Edge Computing Infrastructure Research Articles

Application of Fuzzy Logic for Horizontal Scaling in Kubernetes Environments within the Context of Edge Computing

This paper presents a fuzzy logic-based approach for replica scaling in a Kubernetes environment, focusing on integrating Edge Computing. The proposed FHS (Fuzzy-based Horizontal Scaling) system was compared to the standard Kubernetes scaling mechanism, HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler). The comparison considered resource consumption, the number of replicas used, and adherence to latency Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). The experiments were conducted in an environment simulating Edge Computing infrastructure, with virtual machines used to represent edge nodes and traffic generated via JMeter. The results demonstrate that FHS achieves a reduction in CPU consumption, uses fewer replicas under the same stress conditions, and exhibits more distributed SLA latency violation rates compared to HPA. These results indicate that FHS offers a more efficient and customizable solution for replica scaling in Kubernetes within Edge Computing environments, contributing to both operational efficiency and service quality.

Cloud media video encoding: review and challenges

AbstractIn recent years, Internet traffic patterns have been changing. Most of the traffic demand by end users is multimedia, in particular, video streaming accounts for over 53%. This demand has led to improved network infrastructures and computing architectures to meet the challenges of delivering these multimedia services while maintaining an adequate quality of experience. Focusing on the preparation and adequacy of multimedia content for broadcasting, Cloud and Edge Computing infrastructures have been and will be crucial to offer high and ultra-high definition multimedia content in live, real-time, or video-on-demand scenarios. For these reasons, this review paper presents a detailed study of research papers related to encoding and transcoding techniques in cloud computing environments. It begins by discussing the evolution of streaming and the importance of the encoding process, with a focus on the latest streaming methods and codecs. Then, it examines the role of cloud systems in multimedia environments and provides details on the cloud infrastructure for media scenarios. After doing a systematic literature review, we have been able to find 49 valid papers that meet the requirements specified in the research questions. Each paper has been analyzed and classified according to several criteria, besides to inspect their relevance. To conclude this review, we have identified and elaborated on several challenges and open research issues associated with the development of video codecs optimized for diverse factors within both cloud and edge architectures. Additionally, we have discussed emerging challenges in designing new cloud/edge architectures aimed at more efficient delivery of media traffic. This involves investigating ways to improve the overall performance, reliability, and resource utilization of architectures that support the transmission of multimedia content over both cloud and edge computing environments ensuring a good quality of experience for the final user.

WatchEDGE: Smart networking for distributed AI-based environmental control

Modern applications that make extensive use of AI and ML require the support of an agile network environment that allows raw data to be processed at the edge, where they are collected, while computing functions both for the training and inference phases need to be efficiently moved from site to site. In this paper we present the WatchEDGE project. WatchEDGE studies an advanced edge-computing architecture supporting AI-based image processing applications distributed on geographically-distant sites, which can be adopted for environmental surveillance in the context of smart agriculture and wildlife protection. WatchEDGE is orchestrated to maximize data processing at the edge: each site (or “island”) is equipped with an edge-computing infrastructure that can be provided by fleets of flying drones (FANET); moreover, in the islands there are smart cameras and smart radars; cameras can be either grounded or mounted on board the UAVs. The islands are interconnected by SD-WAN technology. The project is part of the RESTART program, funded by NextGenerationEU.

The Markov Concept of the Energy Efficiency Assessment of the Edge Computing Infrastructure Peripheral Server Functioning over Time

The article is devoted to the research of the peripheral server energy consumption managing process defined based on the threshold policy by manipulating the values of the characteristic parameters of the arithmetic-logical complex of the latter. The research object is formalized by a Markov queue model with a single-threshold control scheme for the intensity of accepted requests service. A characteristic feature of the life cycle of a peripheral server is the non-stationary mode of operation in terms of energy consumption, due to the need to periodically poll the controlled sensor network and process the received data in real-time. To take into account this circumstance, the intensities of transitions in the heterogeneous birth-and-death Markov process of the created model are interpreted as non-random periodic functions of time. The resulting mathematical apparatus is summarized in the metric that allows us to estimate the target peripheral server’s energy consumption both at a specific moment and for a censored time interval (this distinguishes the obtained result from existing analogs).

Service Provisioning in Edge-Cloud Continuum: Emerging Applications for Mobile Devices

Disruptive applications for mobile devices can be enhanced by edge computing facilities. In this context, Edge Computing (EC) is a proposed architecture to meet the mobility requirements imposed by these applications in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things, Immersive Media, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. EC architecture aims to introduce computing capabilities in the path between the user and the Cloud to execute tasks closer to where they are consumed, thus mitigating issues related to latency, context awareness, and mobility support. In this survey, we describe which are the leading technologies to support the deployment of EC infrastructure. Thereafter, we discuss the applications that can take advantage of EC and how they were proposed in the literature. Finally, after examining enabling technologies and related applications, we identify some open challenges to fully achieve the potential of EC, and also research opportunities on upcoming paradigms for service provisioning. This survey is a guide to comprehend the recent advances on the provisioning of mobile applications, as well as foresee the expected next stages of evolution for these applications.

Mobility-Aware Registry Migration for Containerized Applications on Edge Computing Infrastructures

Small footprints and fast provisioning times have promoted container adoption for deploying and managing applications on edge computing environments. As keeping all container images locally would quickly saturate the storage of resource-constrained edge servers, application provisioning consists of pulling container images from external repositories, called registries, located in specific locations in the infrastructure. Existing research reduces deployment time on edge infrastructures by defining the location of container registries. Although such an approach yields positive results in specific scenarios, it overlooks that the demand for container images in certain regions can vary over time according to users’ mobility. This work presents a novel strategy that provisions container registries dynamically based on users’ mobility, spinning up new registries when application provisioning times start growing excessively and deprovisioning registries far away from users. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach reduces the application provisioning time issues by 33.19% on average compared to strategies that allocate container registries statically.

Knowledge reuse in edge computing environments

To cope with the challenge of managing numerous computing devices, humongous data volumes and models in Internet-of-Things environments, Edge Computing (EC) has emerged to serve latency-sensitive and compute-intensive applications. Although EC paradigm significantly eliminates latency for predictive analytics tasks by deploying computation on edge nodes’ vicinity, the large scale of EC infrastructure still has huge inescapable burdens on the required resources. This paper introduces a novel paradigm where edge nodes effectively reuse local completed computations (e.g., trained models) at the network edge, coined as knowledge reuse. Such paradigm releases the burden from individual nodes, where they can save resources by relying on reusing models for various predictive analytics tasks (e.g., regression and classification). We study the feasibility of our paradigm by involving pair-wise (dis)similarity metrics among datasets over nodes based on statistical learning techniques (kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy and eigenspace Cosine Dissimilarity). Our paradigm is enhanced with computationally lightweight monitoring mechanisms, which rely on Holt-Winters to forecast future violations and updates of the reused models. Such mechanisms predict when ‘borrowed’ models are insufficient for being reused, triggering a new process of finding more appropriate models to be reused at the network edge. We provide comprehensive performance evaluation and comparative assessment of our algorithms over different experimental scenarios using real and synthetic datasets. Our findings showcase the ability and robustness of our paradigm to maintain up-to-date reused models at the edge trading off quality of analytics and resource utilization.

An Edge Computing Environment for Early Wildfire Detection

Recently, an increasing demand is growing for installing a rapid response system in forest regions to enable an immediate and appropriate response to wildfires before they spread across vast areas. This paper introduces a multilevel system for early wildfire detection to support public authorities to immediately specify and attend to emergency demands. The presented work is designed and implemented within Edge Computing Infrastructure. At the first level; the dataset samples of wildfire represented by a set of video sequences are collected and labelled for training mode purposes. Then, YOLOv5 deep learning model is adopted in our framework to build a trained model for distinguishing the fire event against non-fire events in binary classification. The proposed system structure comprises IoT entities provided with camera sensor capabilities and NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer kit as an edge computing environment. At the first level, a video camera is employed to assemble environment information received by the micro-controller middle level to handle and detect the possible fire event presenting in the interested area. The last level is characterized as making a decision by sending a text message and snapshot images to the cloud server. Meanwhile, a set of commands are sent to IoT nodes to operate the speakers and sprinklers, which are strategically assumed to place on the ground to give an alarm and prevent wildlife loss. The proposed system was tested and evaluated using a wildfire dataset constructed by our efforts. The experimental results exhibited 98% accurate detection of fire events in the video sequence. Further, a comparison study is performed in this research to confirm the results obtained from recent methods.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing Infrastructure: Design, Resource Management, and Optimization Approaches

Emerging 5G cellular networks are expected to face a dramatic increase in the volume of mobile traffic and IoT user requests due to the massive growth in mobile devices and the emergence of new compute-intensive applications. Running high-intensive compute applications on resource-constrained mobile devices has recently become a major concern, given the constraints of finite computation and limited storage capacities. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has recently become the key technology to overcome these issues by providing cloud computing capabilities and placing IT infrastructures at the mobile network edge. In this survey, we present a list of relevant research papers for the MEC infrastructure implementation phases, including (1) MEC infrastructure designing and dimensioning, (2) MEC infrastructure virtualization using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) concept, and the use of virtualized service placement and auto-scaling methods to deploy an agile system framework, (3) MEC resource management frameworks, and (4) approaches used to optimize the MEC resources on the physical infrastructure. The main focus of this survey is to determine the required aspects to implement an auto-scaled and proactive MEC-NFV infrastructure to support a dynamic and heterogenous mobile users’ demand at mobile network operators.

Bargaining Game-Based Resource Management for Pervasive Edge Computing Infrastructure

The explosive growth of Internet of things (IoT) devices has promoted the prosperity of virtual reality applications, which can be realized by service offloading with the assistance of pervasive edge computing (PEC) platforms. However, owing to the limited computational and communication resources of PEC systems, it is necessary to design a novel resource management algorithm. In this study, we adopt cooperative bargaining theory to design our PEC resource allocation scheme. According to the concept of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">unification bargaining solution</i> , different bargaining ideas are reciprocally combined to provide a fair-efficient solution. By coordinating network agents, we can leverage mutual consensus and approximate a well-balanced system performance among conflicting requirements. It is essential to explore the relevant trade-off between efficiency and fairness. To effectively share the PEC resources, the main novelty of our approach is its adaptability and flexibility to respond dynamic PEC system environments. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out, and the numerical results demonstrate that our unified bargaining method can obtain desirable features while maximizing the offloading service performance by comparing the existing state-of-the-art PEC control protocols.

Named Data Networking Based Disaster Response Support System over Edge Computing Infrastructure

After a disaster happens, effective communication and information sharing between emergency response team members play a crucial role in a successful disaster response phase. With dedicated roles and missions are assigned to responders, role-based communication is a pivotal feature that an emergency communication network needs to support. Previous works have shown that Named Data Networking (NDN) has many advantages over traditional IP-based networks in providing this feature. However, these studies are only simulation-based. To apply NDN in disaster scenarios, real implementation of a deployment architecture over existing infrastructure during the disaster should be considered. Not only should it ensure efficient emergency communication, but the architecture should deal with other disaster-related challenges such as responder mobility, intermittent network, and replacement possibility due to disaster damage. In this paper, we designed and implemented an NDN-based disaster response support system over Edge Computing infrastructure with KubeEdge as the chosen edge platform to solve the above issues. Our proof-of-concept system performance shows that the architecture achieved efficient role-based communication support, fast mobility handover duration, quick network convergence time in case of node replacement, and loss-free information exchange between responders and the management center on the cloud.

A Novel Coevolutionary Approach to Reliability Guaranteed Multi-Workflow Scheduling upon Edge Computing Infrastructures

Recently, mobile edge computing (MEC) is widely believed to be a promising and powerful paradigm for bringing enterprise applications closer to data sources such as IoT devices or local edge servers. It is capable of energizing novel mobile applications, especially the ultra-latency-sensitive ones, by providing powerful local computing capabilities and lower end-to-end delays. Nevertheless, various challenges, especially the reliability-guaranteed scheduling of multitask business processes in terms of, e.g., workflows, upon distributed edge resources and servers, are yet to be carefully addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel edge-environment-based multi-workflow scheduling method, which incorporates a reliability estimation model for edge-workflows and a coevolutionary algorithm for yielding scheduling decisions. The proposed approach aims at maximizing the reliability, in terms of success rates, of services deployed upon edge infrastructures while minimizing service invocation cost for users. We conduct simulative experimental case studies based on multiple well-known scientific workflow templates and a well-known dataset of edge resource locations as well. Simulative results clearly suggest that our proposed approach outperforms traditional ones in terms of workflow success rate and monetary cost.

Corrections to “Network-Aware Placement Optimization for Edge Computing Infrastructure Under 5G”

The above article [1] contained some errors and needs to include the following errata list:

Where There Is Fire There Is SMOKE: A Scalable Edge Computing Framework for Early Fire Detection.

A Cyber-Physical Social System (CPSS) tightly integrates computer systems with the physical world and human activities. In this article, a three-level CPSS for early fire detection is presented to assist public authorities to promptly identify and act on emergency situations. At the bottom level, the system’s architecture involves IoT nodes enabled with sensing and forest monitoring capabilities. Additionally, in this level, the crowd sensing paradigm is exploited to aggregate environmental information collected by end user devices present in the area of interest. Since the IoT nodes suffer from limited computational energy resources, an Edge Computing Infrastructure, at the middle level, facilitates the offloaded data processing regarding possible fire incidents. At the top level, a decision-making service deployed on Cloud nodes integrates data from various sources, including users’ information on social media, and evaluates the situation criticality. In our work, a dynamic resource scaling mechanism for the Edge Computing Infrastructure is designed to address the demanding Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of this IoT-enabled time and mission critical application. The experimental results indicate that the vertical and horizontal scaling on the Edge Computing layer is beneficial for both the performance and the energy consumption of the IoT nodes.

Cooperative mobile edge computing system for VANET-based software-defined content delivery

Next-generation smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) are getting more mature in terms of services and infrastructure requirements. Multiple smart vehicle applications are being conceived these days, including road traffic, road safety and infotainment, all of which are suffering from the WAN-latency problem. In this paper, we propose a Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET)-based Software-Defined Edge Computing infrastructure supporting content delivery services among connected vehicles. The proposed approach leverages network base stations to embed mobile edge computing (MEC) services closer to the vehicles. Our approach can enable the delivery of more competitive services with reduced-latency by utilizing cooperative MEC search strategy for vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications as well as utilizing vehicle-level caching for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications between peers. The framework prototype has been implemented as a clean extension of the Mininet-WiFi emulator. Preliminary results serve as validation of the proposed framework and point out the potential benefits of the approach in mitigating WAN-latency in VANET.

Orchestration Architecture for Automatic Deployment of 5G Services from Bare Metal in Mobile Edge Computing Infrastructure

The progress in realizing the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks has been accelerated recently towards deploying 5G prototypes with increasing scale. One of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in 5G deployments is the service deployment time, which should be substantially reduced from the current 90 hours to the target 90 minutes on average as defined by the 5G Public‐Private Partnership (5G‐PPP). To achieve this challenging KPI, highly automated and coordinated operations are required for the 5G network management. This paper addresses this challenge by designing and prototyping a novel 5G service deployment orchestration architecture that is capable of automating and coordinating a series of complicated operations across physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, and service layers over a distributed mobile edge computing paradigm, in an integrated manner. Empirical results demonstrate the superior performance achieved, which meets the 5G‐PPP KPI even in the most challenging scenario where 5G services are installed from bare metal.

How Can Edge Computing Benefit From Software-Defined Networking: A Survey, Use Cases, and Future Directions

A novel paradigm that changes the scene for the modern communication and computation systems is the Edge Computing. It is not a coincidence that terms like Mobile Cloud Computing, Cloudlets, Fog Computing, and Mobile-Edge Computing are gaining popularity both in academia and industry. In this paper, we embrace all these terms under the umbrella concept of “Edge Computing” to name the trend where computational infrastructures hence the services themselves are getting closer to the end user. However, we observe that bringing computational infrastructures to the proximity of the user does not magically solve all technical challenges. Moreover, it creates complexities of its own when not carefully handled. In this paper, these challenges are discussed in depth and categorically analyzed. As a solution direction, we propose that another major trend in networking, namely software-defined networking (SDN), should be taken into account. SDN, which is not proposed specifically for Edge Computing, can in fact serve as an enabler to lower the complexity barriers involved and let the real potential of Edge Computing be achieved. To fully demonstrate our ideas, initially, we put forward a clear collaboration model for the SDN-Edge Computing interaction through practical architectures and show that SDN related mechanisms can feasibly operate within the Edge Computing infrastructures. Then, we provide a detailed survey of the approaches that comprise the Edge Computing domain. A comparative discussion elaborates on where these technologies meet as well as how they differ. Later, we discuss the capabilities of SDN and align them with the technical shortcomings of Edge Computing implementations. We thoroughly investigate the possible modes of operation and interaction between the aforementioned technologies in all directions and technically deduce a set of “Benefit Areas” which is discussed in detail. Lastly, as SDN is an evolving technology, we give the future directions for enhancing the SDN development so that it can take this collaboration to a further level.