Edge Computing Server Research Articles

Computing tasks assignment optimization among edge computing servers via SDN

As an extension of cloud computing, the edge computing has become an important pattern to deal with novel service scenarios of Internet of Everything (IoE) under 5G, especially for the delay sensitive computing tasks generated from edge equipment. The edge computing provides the key support to meet the characteristics of delay sensitivity by deploying servers near network edges. However, a great many uneven distributed computing tasks in different network edges usually lead to task processing delay bottleneck for single Edge Computing Server (ECS). Tasks assignment is mainly based on the local ECS status without the global network view considered, which also easily leads to unbalanced task loads among multiple ECSs. In this paper, the novel networking idea of Software Defined Network (SDN) is introduced into the edge computing pattern. The logically highly centralized control plane consists of multiple physically distributed ECSs, so as to collaboratively assign computing tasks in a global view. In order to optimize the task assignment and minimize the task processing delay, three schemes are proposed in this paper. The scheme of assessing the ECS’s task computing features is firstly proposed, then the scheme of predicting the ECS’s future unit task processing time is presented. Thus, different types of computing tasks can be assigned to appropriate ECSs that are better at dealing with them with processing delay minimized. Furthermore, the scheme of optimizing the delay of task processing time estimation is devised, so as to further improve task assignment efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is able to optimize the task assignment and minimize the task processing delay more efficiently than the state of the art. Specifically, our mechanism is capable of improving the average unit task processing delay and the ECS load balancing degree by about 14% and 23% respectively, compared with corresponding work.

Stability-Based Analysis and Defense against Backdoor Attacks on Edge Computing Services

With the explosive development of mobile Internet and deep learning (DL), intelligent edge computing services based on collaborative learning are widely deployed in various application scenarios. These intelligent services include intelligent applications based on edge computing and DL-based optimization for edge computing (e.g., caching and communicating). However, in a wide variety of domains, DL has been found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially architecture-independent backdoor attacks. It embeds the attack pattern into the learned model and only performs the attack when it encounters the corresponding trigger. In this article, for the first time we analyze the impact of backdoor attacks on intelligent edge computing services. The simulation results demonstrate that once one or more edge nodes implement backdoor attacks, the embedded attack pattern will rapidly expand to all relevant edge nodes, which poses huge challenges to security-sensitive intelligent edge computing services. Subsequently, we analyze the trade-off between expected performance and ability to defend against backdoor attacks, which sheds new light on designing defense mechanisms for intelligent edge computing services. To address the challenges posed by backdoor attacks, we propose a stability-based defense mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that the newly proposed defense mechanism can effectively defend against different levels of backdoor attacks without knowing whether there are adversaries, which is conducive to the deployment of the stability-based defense mechanism in real-world scenarios.

DAER: A Resource Preallocation Algorithm of Edge Computing Server by Using Blockchain in Intelligent Driving

The introduction of edge computing (EC) in intelligent driving allows the vehicle to offload tasks to the EC server closer to the vehicle side, creating a new paradigm for task offloading and resource allocation. The movement of the vehicle, the time sensitivity of the processing data, and the resource allocation of the EC server have become bottlenecks of the rapid development of intelligent driving. In this article, we jointly considered the problems of the network economy and resource allocation. In order to eliminate dependence on third parties, we propose a resource transaction architecture based on the blockchain. Moreover, we propose the dynamic allocation algorithm of edge resources (DAERs) based on the double auction mechanism to maximize the satisfaction of users and service providers of edge computing (SPs), where the DAER algorithm is implemented in the form of smart contracts in the blockchain architecture. In particular, we propose the state search algorithm that can improve the prediction accuracy of the staged destination of the vehicle to help allocate resources reasonably. Through simulation experiments, we verify the superior performance of the DAER algorithm in terms of resource utilization rate and the satisfaction of both parties participating in the auction.

Real-Time QoS Optimization for Vehicular Edge Computing With Off-Grid Roadside Units

To sustainably provide low-latency communication and edge computing for connected vehicles, a promising solution is using Solar-powered Roadside Units (SRSUs), which consist of small cell base stations and Mobile Edge Computing servers. However, due to the intermittent nature of solar power, SRSUs may suffer from a high risk of power deficiency, which will lead to severe disruption of vehicular edge computing applications. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge of Quality of Service (QoS) loss (i.e., edge computing service outage for vehicle users (VUs)). We formulate a QoS optimization problem for VUs and solve it in two phases: an offline solar energy scheduling phase, and an online user association and SRSU resource allocation phase. We simulate our proposed technique in a dense SRSU network environment with real-world urban vehicular traffic data and solar generation profile. The simulation results show that our proposed approach can significantly reduce QoS loss of vehicular edge computing applications using SRSUs, compared to existing techniques. Further, the results are beneficial to service providers and city planners to identify adequate SRSU configurations for expected solar energy generation and edge computing service demands.

COVID-19 Networking Demand: An Auction-Based Mechanism for Automated Selection of Edge Computing Services.

Network and cloud service providers are facing an unprecedented challenge to meet the demand of end-users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, billions of people around the world are ordered to stay at home and use remote connection technologies to prevent the spread of the disease. The COVID-19 crisis brought a new reality to network service providers that will eventually accelerate the deployment of edge computing resources to attract the massive influx of users’ traffic. The user can elect to procure its resource needs from any edge computing provider based on a variety of attributes such as price and quality. The main challenge for the user is how to choose between the price and multiple quality of service deals when such offerings are changing continually. This problem falls under multi-attribute decision-making. This paper investigates and proposes a novel auction mechanism by which network service brokers would be able to automate the selection of edge computing offers to support their end-users. We also propose a multi-attribute decision-making model that allows the broker to maximize its utility when several bids from edge-network providers are present. The evaluation and experimentation show the practicality and robustness of the proposed model.

NOVN: A named-object based virtual network architecture to support advanced mobile edge computing services

Achieving advanced Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) services such as dynamic resource assignment and slicing, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS), and enabling heterogeneous virtual functions are some of the technical challenges associated with edge-cloud enhanced 5G architectures now under consideration. This paper proposes a named-object based virtual network (NOVN) architecture to support low-latency applications in the MEC. Software router implementation running on the ORBIT testbed validates the named-object approach, showing low VN processing and control overhead, and making it possible to achieve low latency. A latency performance improvement of 30% is achieved as compared to the baseline implementation without NOVN. The results also validate feasibility of using the advanced MEC services for an example latency constrained edge cloud scenario.

Reservation Service: Trusted Relay Selection for Edge Computing Services in Vehicular Networks

Driven by the ever-increasing demands of vehicular services, edge computing has become a promising paradigm to facilitate edge services in vehicular networks by using edge computing devices (ECDs). To enhance the service experience, we develop a reservation service framework, where the reservation service request of a vehicle needs to be relayed to one of the ECDs which is ahead of its driving direction. However, due to the various behaviors of vehicles, not all the vehicles are trustworthy and willing to join in the service request relay process. Therefore, how to exploit the cooperation between ECDs and vehicles to relay the service request by considering the dynamic traffic status and the behaviors of vehicles becomes a challenge. As an effort to address this problem, we propose a trusted relay selection scheme for edge services to facilitate the proposed reservation service framework. Specifically, we first design the request relay mechanism based on the dynamic traffic status to guarantee the efficiency of the relay process. Then, the reputation management mechanism is presented to constrain the behaviors of vehicles, where a vehicle with high reputation value can enjoy the price discount for computing service. Based on the designed request relay and reputation management mechanisms, a reputation-based auction approach is then proposed to select relay vehicles (RVs) to reduce the cost of the relay service. Simulation results show that the proposed reservation service framework can manage vehicles efficiently and lead to the lowest cost for the relay services compared with the conventional schemes.

Cluster-head Centered Fast Secure Routing based on Game theory for Device-to-Device Communication

The unique distributed architecture of device-to-device (D2D) networks makes its devices and users more vulnerable to security and privacy threats, especially from malware. To protect the D2D network from the malware, we designed and implemented a novel routing protocol, Cluster-head Centered Fast Secure Routing. The protocol requires all of the member nodes to pass data packets through the Secure Routes selected by the cluster-head that optimizes routing decisions to reduces the possibility of the nodes receiving packets with malware. After our analysis, the strategy is the optimal coping strategy of the defender whenever the attacker using the Nash game strategy, the Stackelberg game strategy, considering the case of both zero-sum and the non-zero sum. Moreover, to ensure the security of the cluster-head, we have set up the Mobile Edge Computing servers at the edge of the D2D networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed routing protocol can balance network security and Quality of Service, thus confirming that our proposed routing algorithm has practical significance.

Performance Analysis of Edge Computing in IoT

Upcoming 5G technology and the demand for near real-time response services raise the need for optimizing current IoT solutions. The aim of this paper is to model and execute the performance analysis of network structures suitable for Edge Computing in IoT. The prior research into different topology and parameter sets have not provided sufficient clarity, on which parameters had a considerable impact on overall system performance; therefore, repetitive simulations were performed to express dispersion of alternating values, as well as determining its confidence intervals. The paper presents Edge Computing service simulation setup on known and newly derived network topologies with different complexity varying network bandwidth and network delay parameters. The experimental investigation has revealed that the IoT configuration network is more sensitive to network topology, while the Internet configuration is more sensitive to network parameters. The discussion on the results received debates possible causes of performance differences in network parameters and device configurations, the comparison to similar state-of-the-art research results has also been presented. Finally, conclusions with recommendations based on the results acquired have been provided.

A Collaborative Service Deployment and Application Assignment Method for Regional Edge Computing Enabled IoT

Edge computing brings powerful computing ability to the proximity of IoT devices to guarantee latency constraints, making it one essential technology for supporting intelligent applications in future Internet of Things (IoT). Collaboration among edge computing servers (ECSs) with limited resources is an efficient solution to enhance the capability of edge network, and placement of ECSs and service functions (SFs) impose significant influences on system performance. This paper explores the collaboration among ECSs by considering the simultaneous and heterogeneous consumption of different computing resources. The service deployment and application assignment in regional edge computing enabled IoT (EdgeIoT) are investigated. A collaborative service deployment and application assignment (ColSDA) algorithm is proposed to render the final edge service deployment strategy, including the placement of ECSs and SFs as well as the assignment of applications to ECSs. In ColSDA, the minimum number of ECSs to be placed is obtained by the proposed minimum resource ration increase (MinRI) algorithm. Computing loads are then balanced by the load-balancing reassignment (LBRA) algorithm. After placing ECSs, a search and swap (SeSw) algorithm is proposed to further increase the number of tasks processed by locally deployed ECSs. Simulation results demonstrate that the number of required ECSs under the premise of guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) can be significantly reduced by establishing collaboration among ECSs. Besides, the proposed ColSDA algorithm can provide the service deployment and application assignment strategy for a given region EdgeIoT as expected.

Distributed Edge Computing Offloading Algorithm Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

As a mode of processing task request, edge computing paradigm can reduce task delay and effectively alleviate network congestion caused by the proliferation of Internet of things(IoT) devices compared with cloud computing. However, in the actual construction of the network, there are various edge autonomous subnets in the adjacent areas, which leads to the possibility of unbalance of server load among autonomous subnets during the peak period of task request. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to solve the complex computation offloading problem for the heterogeneous Edge Computing Server(ECS) collaborative computing. The problem is solved based on the real-time state of the network and the attributes of the task, which adopts Actor Critic and Policy Gradient's Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient(DDPG) to make optimized decisions of computation offloading. Considering multi-task, the heterogeneity of edge subnet and mobility of edge devices, the proposed algorithm can learn the network environment and generate the computation offloading decision to minimize the task delay.The simulation results show that the proposed DDPG-based algorithm is competitive compared with the Deep Q Network(DQN) algorithm and Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic(A3C) algorithm. Moreover, the optimal solutions are leveraged to analyze the influence of edge network parameters on task delay.

Task Offloading Strategy Based on Reinforcement Learning Computing in Edge Computing Architecture of Internet of Vehicles

With the rapid increase of vehicles, the explosive growth of data flow and the increasing shortage of spectrum resources, the performance of existing task offloading scheme is poor, and the on-board terminal can’t achieve efficient computing. Therefore, this article proposes a task offload strategy based on reinforcement learning computing in edge computing architecture of Internet of vehicles. Firstly, the system architecture of Internet of vehicles is designed. The Road Side Unit receives the vehicle data in community and transmits it to Mobile Edge Computing server for data analysis, while the control center collects all vehicle information. Then, the calculation model, communication model, interference model and privacy issues are constructed to ensure the rationality of task offloading in Internet of vehicles. Finally, the user cost function is minimized as objective function, and double-layer deep Q-network in deep reinforcement learning algorithm is used to solve the problem for real-time change of network state caused by user movement. The results show that the proposed offloading strategy can achieve fast convergence. Besides, the impact of user number, vehicle speed and MEC computing power on user cost is the least compared with other offloading schemes. The task offloading rate of our proposed strategy is the highest with better performance, which is more suitable for the scenario of Internet of vehicles.

Resource allocation for edge computing over fibre‐wireless access networks

Edge Computing (EC) has been proposed as a promising approach to fulfil the requirements of high bandwidth and ultra-latency of mobile applications. However, existing researches on resource allocation only consider the computing resource of mobile devices and EC servers, while ignored the constraint of the networking resources once spreading applications among multiple EC servers via wireless and wired networks. Fibre-Wireless access networks (FiWi) combine the huge bandwidth of optical fibre networks and flexible access of wireless networks to address the above issue and bridge the coexistence of multiple EC servers. They propose a Virtualisation-based Architecture converging EC over FiWi (VAECFW) to centralise control and allocate networking and computing resources for serving requested services. In addition, they study the problem of resource allocation of EC over FiWi and propose two algorithms Revenue-based Virtual Network Embedding (R-VNE) and Balanced Central Processing Unit Resource Allocation with Virtual Network Embedding (BCRA-VNE). Simulation experiments show that the services acceptance ratio is increased about 35% under their proposed architecture, and the average service requests bandwidth utilisation of R-VNE is increasing from 50 to 66%, and the BCRA-VNE is from 37 to 48%. The two algorithms not only achieve higher revenue but also get better profit rate.

K-LZF : An efficient and fair scheduling for Edge Computing servers

Abstract With the emergence of the increasingly heterogeneous Internet of Things(IoT) devices, Edge Computing servers are required to support a variety of services with different quality of service requirements. The degree of heterogeneity of IoT devices makes it more difficult to fairly and efficiently allocate resources based on the task’s weight. However, most fair schedulers are not suitable for simultaneously providing scalability and robustness in Edge Computing servers. In this paper, we propose K-LZF which is an efficient and fair scheduling algorithm for Edge Computing Servers. K-LZF aims to achieve a high level of proportional fairness for a large number of heterogeneous tasks, with constant overhead. We simulated and evaluated the performance of the proposed K-LZF in a heterogeneous IoT environment. We also designed and implemented in the AVOS kernel to show that it is applicable in actual IoT environment. The results of the simulation and implementations show that the proposed K-LZF outperforms several existing scheduling algorithm with respect to scalability and robustness even when the degree of task heterogeneity becomes high.

Energy-Efficient MTC Data Offloading in Wireless Networks Based on K-Means Grouping Technique

Machine-type communication (MTC) devices provide a broad range of data collection especially on the massive data generated environments such as urban, industrials and event-enabled areas. In dense deployments, the data collected at the closest locations between the MTC devices are spatially correlated. In this paper, we propose a k-means grouping technique to combine all MTC devices based on spatially correlated. The MTC devices collect the data on the event-based area and then transmit to the centralized aggregator for processing and computing. With the limitation of computational resources at the centralized aggregator, some grouped MTC devices data offloaded to the nearby base station collocated with the mobile edge-computing server. As a sensing capability adopted on MTC devices, we use a power exponential function model to compute a correlation coefficient existing between the MTC devices. Based on this framework, we compare the energy consumption when all data processed locally at centralized aggregator or offloaded at mobile edge computing server with optimal solution obtained by the brute force method. Then, the simulation results revealed that the proposed k-means grouping technique reduce the energy consumption at centralized aggregator while satisfying the required completion time.

A Scalable Cluster-based Infrastructure for Edge-computing Services

In this paper we present a scalable and dynamic intermediary infrastructure, SEcS (acronym of "Scalable Edge computing Services"), for developing and deploying advanced Edge computing services, by using a cluster of heterogeneous machines. Our goal is to address the challenges of the next-generation Internet services: scalability, high availability, fault-tolerance and robustness, as well as programmability and quick prototyping. The system is written in Java and is based on IBM's Web Based Intermediaries (WBI) [71] developed at IBM Almaden Research Center.