Collaborative Computing Research Articles

Optimization of Edge–Cloud Collaborative Computing Resource Management for Internet of Vehicles Based on Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Optimization of Edge–Cloud Collaborative Computing Resource Management for Internet of Vehicles Based on Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning

ApSpGEMM: Accelerating Large-scale SpGEMM with Heterogeneous Collaboration and Adaptive Panel

The Sparse General Matrix-Matrix multiplication (SpGEMM) is a fundamental component for many applications, such as algebraic multigrid methods (AMG), graphic processing, and deep learning. However, the unbearable latency of computing high-dimensional, large-scale sparse matrix multiplication on GPUs hinders the development of these applications. An effective approach is heterogeneous cores collaborative computing, but this method must address three aspects: (1) irregular non-zero elements lead to load imbalance and irregular memory access, (2) different core computing latency differences reduce computational parallelism, and (3) temporary data transfer between different cores introduces additional latency overhead. In this work, we propose an innovative framework for collaborative large-scale sparse matrix multiplication on CPU-GPU heterogeneous cores, named ApSpGEMM. ApSpGEMM is based on sparsity rules and proposes reordering and splitting algorithms to eliminate the impact of non-zero element distribution features on load and memory access. Then adaptive panels allocation with affinity constraints among cores improves computational parallelism. Finally, carefully arranged asynchronous data transmission and computation balance communication overhead. Compared with state-of-the-art SpGEMM methods, our approach provides excellent absolute performance on matrices with different sparse structures. On heterogeneous cores, the GFlops of large-scale sparse matrix multiplication is improved by 2.25 to 7.21 times.

Dynamic Parallel Multi-Server Selection and Allocation in Collaborative Edge Computing

Dynamic Parallel Multi-Server Selection and Allocation in Collaborative Edge Computing

IoT-Enabled Secure and Scalable Cloud Architecture for Multi-User Systems: A Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptographic and Block Chain-Based Approach towards a Trustworthy Cloud Computing

Cloud computing remains one of the most significant advancements in resource provision to organizations in the latest decades since they initiate conveniences on demand access. The adoption of the IoT has brought about a new era of collaborative computing by employing a pool of linked smart sensors and devices that will produce and analyze great amounts of data, thus creating new related problems in terms of size and security, hence increasing even more the importance of traditional security measures. Therefore, in this paper, we synthesize a new SSCA that combines IoT and cryptographic mechanisms, to build highly available and secure cloud systems, which makes these systems multi-users and fully usable by many users at the same time. The design resolves to a distributed structure where sever al cloud nodes will address user s requests proficiently and it uses Multicast and Broadcast Rekeying Algorithm (MBRA) to maintain the privacy and the confidentiality of the users’ detail, employing a cryptosystem that integrates MBRA, Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and block chain. The architecture using IoT devices collects data from the distributed sensing resources through the data storage layer; it enforces the security integrity of the information collected by employing the MBRA-PQC encryption algorithms; the blockchain provides the security for the confidential data by storing it in unalterable and dispersed registers. The proposed approach is then demonstrated with different data sets and its performance is measured based on the response time, the throughput and scalability, security and reliability. The outcome of the expressions reveals the efficiency of the proposed SSCA compared to MHE-IS-CPMT as it reduced by 1. 67 seconds and 0. 97 seconds at 250 and 1000 devices respectively. Similarly, the result as AUC value for SSCA showed a better improvement than the MHE-IS-CPMT, EAM, SCSS, and SHCEF models with improvements in percent at 25-user level: 6. 30%, 6. 90%, 7. 60%, and 7. 30%, respectively as well as; at 50-user level: 5. 20%, 9. 30%, 11. 50%.

MatSwarm: trusted swarm transfer learning driven materials computation for secure big data sharing

The rapid advancement of Industry 4.0 necessitates close collaboration among material research institutions to accelerate the development of novel materials. However, multi-institutional cooperation faces significant challenges in protecting sensitive data, leading to data silos. Additionally, the heterogeneous and non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) nature of material data hinders model accuracy and generalization in collaborative computing. In this paper, we introduce the MatSwarm framework, built on swarm learning, which integrates federated learning with blockchain technology. MatSwarm features two key innovations: a swarm transfer learning method with a regularization term to enhance the alignment of local model parameters, and the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) with Intel SGX for heightened security. These advancements significantly enhance accuracy, generalization, and ensure data confidentiality throughout the model training and aggregation processes. Implemented within the National Material Data Management and Services (NMDMS) platform, MatSwarm has successfully aggregated over 14 million material data entries from more than thirty research institutions across China. The framework has demonstrated superior accuracy and generalization compared to models trained independently by individual institutions.

Latency Reduction in Immersive Systems through Request Scheduling with Digital Twin Networks in Collaborative Edge Computing

Immersive systems, which offer immersive interactive experiences by tightly coupling the real and virtual worlds, encompassing Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), have undergone rapid development in recent years. The inherent latency issue of immersive systems poses considerable challenges for AR/VR applications that are highly sensitive to delay. To address this challenge, we propose utilizing edge collaboration as an efficient means to schedule AR/VR requests, owing to the inherent ability of edge nodes to seamlessly coordinate within the same geographical region and optimally allocate request resources to minimize latency. However, when it comes to edge nodes across different regions, a significant hurdle emerges. These nodes often lack real-time knowledge about cached resources across other regions, making cross-regional edge collaboration for AR/VR request scheduling an extremely challenging problem. We formally define and prove the NP-hardness of this problem. To tackle this complexity, we introduce a Federated Digital Twin Model Construction (FedDT), which establishes a global digital twin network connecting different edge nodes. This network simulates and reflects the resource status and availability of each edge node in real time. Subsequently, we devise an extended Dijkstra algorithm to determine the shortest path between AR/VR requests and edge nodes, taking into account current network conditions to optimize service delay. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results confirm that compared with baseline methods, our proposed solution consistently achieves an average delay reduction of 36.78% across various scenarios, effectively demonstrating its superior performance.

A node deployment and resource optimization method for CPDS based on cloud‐fog‐edge collaboration

AbstractWith the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in power distribution and the advancement of energy information integration technologies, the explosive growth in network data volume caused by massive terminal devices connecting to the power distribution network has become a significant challenge. Multi‐terminal collaborative computing is a key approach to addressing issues such as high latency and high energy consumption. In this article, fog computing is introduced into the computing network of the power distribution system, and a cloud‐fog‐edge collaborative computing architecture for intelligent power distribution networks is proposed. Within this framework, an improved weighted K‐means method based on information entropy theory is presented for node partitioning. Subsequently, an improved multi‐objective particle swarm optimization algorithm (MWM‐MOPSO) is employed to solve the task resource allocation problem. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and allocation strategy is validated through simulations on the OPNET and PureEdgeSim platforms. The results demonstrate that, compared to traditional cloud‐edge service architectures, the proposed architecture and task offloading scheme achieve better performance in terms of processing latency and energy consumption.

Multi-label semantic segmentation of magnetic resonance images of the prostate gland

Prostate segmentation is a substantial factor in the diagnostic pathway of suspicious prostate lesions. Medical doctors are assisted by computer-aided detection and diagnosis systems systems and methods derived from artificial intelligence deep learning-based systems have to be trained on existing data. Especially freely available labeled prostate magnetic resonance imaging data is rare. With regard to this problem, we show a method to combine two existing small datasets to form a bigger one. We present a data processing pipeline consisting of a cascaded network architecture that is able to perform multi-label semantic segmentation, hence, capable of classifying each pixel in a T2\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\ extrm{T}_{2}$$\\end{document}-weighted image not only to one class but to a subset of the prostate zones and classes of interest. This delivers richer information such as overlapping zones that are key to medical radiological examination. Additionally, we describe how to integrate expert knowledge in our deep learning system. To increase data variety for training and evaluation we use image augmentation on our two datasets—a freely available dataset and our new open-source dataset. To combine the datasets we denoise the contourings in our dataset by using an effective yet simple algorithm based on standard computer vision methods only. The performance of the presented methodology is compared and evaluated using the dice score metric and 5-fold cross-validation on all datasets. Although we trained on tiny datasets our method achieves excellent segmentation quality and is even able to detect prostate cancer. Our method to combine the two datasets reduces segmentation errors and increases data variety. The proposed architecture significantly improves performance by including expert knowledge via feature-map concatenation. On the initiative for collaborative computer vision benchmarking dataset we achieve on average dice scores of approximately 91% for the whole prostate gland, 67% for the peripheral zone and 75% for the prostate central gland. We find that image augmentation except contrast limited adaptive histogram equalisation did not have much influence on the segmentation quality. Derived and enhanced from existing methods we present an approach that is able to deliver multi-label semantic segmentation results for prostate magnetic resonance imaging. This approach is simple and could be applied to other applications of deep learning as well. It improves the segmentation results by a large margin. Once tweaked to the data, our denoising and combination algorithm delivers robust and accurate results even on data with segmentation errors.

Overview of blockchain-based terminal-edge-cloud collaborative computing paradigm

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), terminal-edge-cloud collaborative computing (TECC), a hierarchical distributed computing model, has become an effective solution to meet the various application requirements in terms of high computing power, high storage capacity, and low-latency services. However, the TECC still faces many challenges in terms of data security and privacy protection. Integrating blockchain into TECC frameworks can enable trustful data exchange between nodes while ensuring the integrity and availability of data. This paper presents an in-depth survey of blockchain-based TECC technology. In particular, we first introduce the key of the TECC paradigm and blockchain briefly. Then we focus on the integration of blockchain into the TECC paradigm. Specifically, the paper divides the TECC frameworks into three categories: one-layer, two-layers and multiple layers. Moreover, this paper summarizes core technologies in blockchain-based TECC architectures, TECC based on lightweight blockchains, and summarizes the application scenarios from different perspectives. Finally, the paper outlines the future direction of blockchain-based TECC.

A Secure and Fair Federated Learning Framework Based on Consensus Incentive Mechanism

Federated learning facilitates collaborative computation among multiple participants while safeguarding user privacy. However, current federated learning algorithms operate under the assumption that all participants are trustworthy and their systems are secure. Nonetheless, real-world scenarios present several challenges: (1) Malicious clients disrupt federated learning through model poisoning and data poisoning attacks. Although some research has proposed secure aggregation methods to address this issue, many methods have inherent limitations. (2) Clients may refuse or passively participate in the training process due to considerations of self-interest, and may even interfere with the training process due to competitive relationships. To overcome these obstacles, we have devised a reliable federated framework aimed at ensuring secure computing throughout the entirety of federated task processes. Initially, we propose a method for detecting malicious models to safeguard the integrity of model aggregation. Furthermore, we have proposed a fair contribution assessment method and awarded the right to write blocks to the creator of the optimal model, ensuring the active participation of participants in both local training and model aggregation. Finally, we establish a computational framework grounded in blockchain and smart contracts to uphold the integrity and fairness of federated tasks. To assess the efficacy of our framework, we conduct simulations involving various types of client attacks and contribution assessment scenarios using multiple open-source datasets. Results from these experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively ensures the credibility of federated tasks while achieving impartial evaluation of client contributions.

A REVIEW PAPER ON ETHICAL HACKING

Ethical Hacking is a proactive approach to cybersecurity that involves authorizing and systematically testing information systems to find vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by criminals. Ethical hackers are network and computer experts who attack security systems on behalf of their owners, looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious hackers. The explosive growth of the Internet has given rise to many good things, including electronic commerce, email, collaborative computing, and new areas of advertising and information distribution. Ethical hacking, also known as penetration testing, or red teaming, has become a major concern for businesses and governments. Organizations are concerned about the possibility of being "hacked" and potential customers are concerned about having their personal information under control. Hackers are classified according to their work and knowledge. White hat hackers are ethical hackers. Ethical hackers use hacking techniques to ensure security. Ethical hacking is necessary to protect systems from damage. KEYWORDS: Cybersecurity, Ethical Hacking, It’s Impact, Vulnerability Assessment, Security Tool, Cyberthreats

Self-aware collaborative edge inference with embedded devices for IIoT

Edge inference and other compute-intensive industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications suffer from a bad quality of experience due to the limited and heterogeneous computing and communication resources of embedded devices. To tackle these issues, we propose a model partitioning-based self-aware collaborative edge inference framework. Specifically, the device can adaptively adjust the local model inference scheme by sensing the available computing and communication resources of surrounding devices. When the inference latency requirement cannot be met by local computation, the model should be partitioned for collaborative computation on other devices to improve the inference efficiency. Furthermore, for two typical IIoT scenarios, i.e., bursting and stacking tasks, the latency-aware and throughput-aware collaborative inference algorithms are designed, respectively. Via jointly optimizing the partition layer and collaborative device selection, the optimal inference efficiency, characterized by minimum inference latency and maximum inference throughput, can be obtained. Finally, the performance of our proposal is validated through extensive simulations and tests conducted on 10 Raspberry Pi 4Bs using popular models. Specifically, in the case of two collaborative devices, our platform reaches up to 92.59% latency reduction for bursting tasks and 16.19× throughput growth for stacking tasks. In addition, the divergence between simulations and tests ranges from 1.64% to 9.56% for bursting tasks and from 3.24% to 11.24% for stacking tasks, which indicates that the theoretical performance analyses are solid. For the general case where the data privacy is not considered and the number of collaborative devices is optimally determined, up to 14.76× throughput speed up and 84.04% latency reduction can be obtained.

Improved ECC cryptosystem-based lightweight authentication for SDN-based edge computing in IoT-enabled healthcare systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of smart devices with limited resources that can identify and analyze data. In IoT-enabled healthcare systems, the security of IoT devices and the data they contain is complex. These devices in the healthcare industry, edge computing can provide low-latency information services at a reasonable cost. This work proposes a security infrastructure for Software Defined Network (SDN)-based edge computing in IoT-enabled healthcare systems consisting of three steps: Lightweight authentication, collaborative edge computing and job migration. The lightweight authentication step involves both Improved Lightweight Key Management (ILKM) and Improved Elliptic Curve Cryptography (IECC) schemes to ensure authentication among the devices and edge servers. Moreover, the patient’s data in IoT devices are scheduled to the appropriate edge server by examining the load balancing in the collaborative edge computing phase. This is done optimally using the adopted hybrid optimization model, Osprey Assisted Coati Optimization Algorithm (OACOA). Further, job migration takes place, in which the data is allocated to the edge server by comparing the capacity of edge servers and the data gets migrated to other servers by considering migration cost when the capacity of the edge server is overloaded. Finally, the efficiency of the suggested OACOA scheme is evaluated over traditional models with regard to several metrics. When considering the edge-server 30, the OACOA scheme achieves a makespan of 385, while conventional methods acquired fewer makespan ratings. Also, the OACOA approach obtained the highest security ratings (0.7143) on edge-server 20 when compared to existing schemes.

Collaborative human and computer controls of smart machines – A proposed hybrid control

Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) and Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) are evolving technologies that show the great potentials to extract and utilize humans’ intents in controlling smart machines. However, existing HMI and BCI technologies are limited in terms of (1) the number of Degrees- of-Freedom (DoF) to be controlled and (2) the ways the performance of BCI-enabled control systems are verified and validated. This study aimed to explore the solutions to addree both of above concerns; we proposed a hybrid control system that is capable of training, detecting, and interpreting humans’ intents, and utilizing humans’ intents in real-time controls of smart machines. More specifically, the system acquired brain signals in the form of Electroencephalography (EEG) by an Emotiv Epoc X and processed these signals to detect and extract humans’ intents in real-time machine controls. To cope with the frequency difference of humans’ thinking and machine motion controls, we developed a hybrid control module to fuse humans’ and machine's intelligence so that low-frequency humans’ intents could be used in real-time machine controls. The system was prototyped and verified experimentally. The system was verified to achieve the accuracy of over 90 % in recognizing humans’ intents and controlling a robot by the operator's intents with a satisfactory responding time and accuracy.

An Efficient Algorithm for Microservice Placement in Cloud-Edge Collaborative Computing Environment

An Efficient Algorithm for Microservice Placement in Cloud-Edge Collaborative Computing Environment

Blockchain-assisted Verifiable Secure Multi-Party Data Computing

Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) is a crucial technology that supports privacy preservation, enabling multiple users to perform computations on any function without disclosing their private inputs and outputs in a distrustful environment. Existing secure multi-party computation models typically rely on obfuscation circuits and cryptographic protocols to facilitate collaborative computation of tasks. However, the efficiency and privacy leakage of users have not been paid much attention during the computation process. To address these problems, this article proposes a privacy-preserving approach Blockchain-assisted Verifiable Secure Multi-Party Data Computing (BVS-MPDC). Specifically, to prevent privacy leakage when users and multiple participants share data, BVS-MPDC uses additive homomorphic encryption to encrypt data shares; and verifies the generated Pedersen commitment of all the data. BVS-MPDC utilizes an improved Schnorr aggregation signature to improve computation efficiency between computing nodes and smart contracts by submitting an aggregation signature to the blockchain. Moreover, we design and implement a smart contract for verifying aggregation signature results on Ethereum. The security proof is presented under the UC framework. Finally, simulation experiments of performance evaluations demonstrate that our scheme outperforms existing schemes in computation overhead and verification.

PODI: A Private Object Detection Inference framework for autonomous vehicles

Object detection is essential for autonomous vehicles to perceive and understand their environment. The restricted storage and processing capacities of vehicles necessitate the outsourcing of object detection services. However, this may raise concerns regarding the privacy of the uploaded images. Although there have been some studies on privacy-preserving object detection networks, they either lack location privacy protection or involve excessive computational and communication overheads. To address this issue, we propose a private object detection inference framework (PODI), which is based on a Faster R-CNN and aims to protect both classification and location privacy. PODI employs additive secret sharing protocols to support collaborative computation between two edge servers. By using efficient protocols such as secure Maxpool, secure array access, and secure exponent, PODI significantly reduces computational and communication overheads. A theoretical analysis has confirmed the security, correctness, and efficiency of PODI. Extensive experiments were used to demonstrate its security, inference accuracy comparable to plaintext approaches, and lower cost of secure inference.

TOMOMAN: a software package for large scale cryo-electron tomography data preprocessing, community data sharing, and collaborative computing.

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and subtomogram averaging (STA) are becoming the preferred methodologies for investigating subcellular and macromolecular structures in native or near-native environments. While cryo-ET is amenable to a wide range of biological problems, these problems often have data processing requirements that need to be individually optimized, precluding the notion of a one-size-fits-all processing pipeline. Cryo-ET data processing is also becoming progressively more complex due to an increasing number of packages for each processing step. Though each package has its own strengths and weaknesses, independent development and different data formats makes them difficult to interface with one another. TOMOMAN (TOMOgram MANager) is an extensible package for streamlining the interoperability of packages, enabling users to develop project-specific processing workflows. TOMOMAN does this by maintaining an internal metadata format and wrapping external packages to manage and perform preprocessing, from raw tilt-series data to reconstructed tomograms. TOMOMAN can also export this metadata between various STA packages. TOMOMAN also includes tools for archiving projects to data repositories; allowing subsequent users to download TOMOMAN projects and directly resume processing where it was previously left off. By tracking essential metadata, TOMOMAN streamlines data sharing, which improves reproducibility of published results, reduces computational costs by minimizing reprocessing, and enables distributed cryo-ET projects between multiple groups and institutions. TOMOMAN provides a way for users to test different software packages to develop processing workflows that meet the specific needs of their biological questions and to distribute their results with the broader scientific community.

Autonomous Smart-Edge Fault Diagnostics via Edge-Cloud-Orchestrated Collaborative Computing for Infrared Electrical Equipment Images

Autonomous Smart-Edge Fault Diagnostics via Edge-Cloud-Orchestrated Collaborative Computing for Infrared Electrical Equipment Images

Proactive Caching With Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning in 6G Cloud-Edge Collaboration Computing

Proactive Caching With Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning in 6G Cloud-Edge Collaboration Computing