Traditional Cloud Research Articles

Optimizing Performance in Mobile Applications with Edge Computing

In the ever-evolving landscape of mobile computing, the performance and responsiveness of mobile applications are critical factors influencing user satisfaction and engagement. Traditional cloud-based approaches, while effective, often suffer from latency issues due to the distance data must travel between the user’s device and the cloud servers. This latency can significantly impact the user experience, especially in applications requiring real-time data processing and responsiveness. Edge computing has emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by bringing computational resources closer to the end user. Edge computing decentralizes data processing by distributing computational tasks across a network of local nodes, or "edges," which are closer to the source of data. This architecture reduces the distance data must travel, thereby decreasing latency and improving application performance. The integration of edge computing in mobile applications allows for faster data processing, real-time analytics, and improved overall user experience. This paper explores the optimization of mobile application performance through the implementation of edge computing strategies. It begins with an overview of edge computing principles, highlighting its benefits over traditional cloud computing, including reduced latency, improved bandwidth efficiency, and enhanced data privacy. The paper then delves into various use cases where edge computing can be particularly beneficial for mobile applications, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. By examining these use cases, the paper illustrates how edge computing can address specific performance challenges and enhance the functionality of mobile apps.

A Survey on Edge Intelligence and Lightweight Machine Learning Support for Future Applications and Services

As the number of devices connected to the Internet has grown larger, so too has the intensity of the tasks that these devices need to perform. Modern networks are more frequently working to perform computationally intensive tasks on low-power devices and low-end hardware. Current architectures and platforms tend towards centralized and resource-rich cloud computing approaches to address these deficits. However, edge computing presents a much more viable and flexible alternative. Edge computing refers to a distributed and decentralized network architecture in which demanding tasks such as image recognition, smart city services, and high-intensity data processing tasks can be distributed over a number of integrated network devices. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey for emerging edge intelligence applications, lightweight machine learning algorithms, and their support for future applications and services. We start by analyzing the rise of cloud computing, discuss its weak points, and identify situations in which edge computing provides advantages over traditional cloud computing architectures. We then divulge details of the survey: the first section identifies opportunities and domains for edge computing growth, the second identifies algorithms and approaches that can be used to enhance edge intelligence implementations, and the third specifically analyzes situations in which edge intelligence can be enhanced using any of the aforementioned algorithms or approaches. In this third section, lightweight machine learning approaches are detailed. A more in-depth analysis and discussion of future developments follows. The primary discourse of this article is in service of an effort to ensure that appropriate approaches are applied adequately to artificial intelligence implementations in edge systems, mainly, the lightweight machine learning approaches.

A Secure Recommender System Model for Service Placement in Wireless Networks

Edge or fog computing are being used to reduce latency between end devices and traditional cloud computing. The latest developments that have improved the hardware aspects of wireless sensors and mobile networks, gave the opportunity for other enhancements if such technologies are integrated between them. Regarding this enhanced heterogeneous environment, the approach of placing services needs to reconsider the security aspects. We have developed a baseline method of a solution which fulfills the cybersecurity requirements converging with the proposed multi-tier integrated model, that enhances the K-means algorithm with added processing steps supplying the criteria of the CIA triad.

A collaborative auditing scheme with dynamic data updates based on blockchain

Cloud data auditing is essential to ensure the integrity of cloud data. The main idea of cloud auditing is to entrust the audit task to a third-party auditor (TPA) with powerful computing ability. However, TPA may lead to data leakage and become the single point of failure. Recently, blockchain has been introduced to solve these problems by TPA. However, the dynamic storage structure developed by traditional cloud storage does not apply to the blockchain. This paper proposes a blockchain-based collaborative public auditing scheme for dynamic data. We design the cloud service provider(CSP) to generate a challenge set using the latest block hash. It does not need to interact with the blockchain in the challenge phase, dramatically reducing communication overhead. In addition, considering economic factors, we allow users to seek partners to reduce audit costs. The EigenTrust model evaluates the reputation of each user's audit behaviour, effectively avoiding the probability of malicious users participating. For data update, we introduce the Pseudo Index Linked List(PIL) index management structure, which reduces the size of the index management structure to adapt to the blockchain's characteristics and makes the update operation have a constant time complexity. Through a complete security analysis and performance evaluation, we proved the security and effectiveness of the scheme.

Energy Efficient Load-Balancing Mechanism in Integrated IoT–Fog–Cloud Environment

The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have revolutionized the technological era unabatedly. These technologies have impacted our lives to a great extent. The traditional cloud model faces a variety of complications with the colossal growth of IoT and cloud applications, such as network instability, reduced bandwidth, and high latency. Fog computing is utilized to get around these problems, which brings IoT devices and cloud computing closer. Hence, to enhance system, process, and data performance, fog nodes are planted to disperse the load on cloud servers using fog computing, which helps reduce delay time and network traffic. Firstly, in this article, we highlight the various IoT–fog–cloud models for distributing the load uniformly. Secondly, an efficient solution is provided using fog computing for balancing load among fog devices. A performance evaluation of the proposed mechanism with existing techniques shows that the proposed strategy improves performance, energy consumption, throughput, and resource utilization while reducing response time.

Delay reduction in MTC using SDN based offloading in Fog computing.

Fog computing (FC) brings a Cloud close to users and improves the quality of service and delay services. In this article, the convergence of FC and Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) has been proposed to implement complicated mechanisms of resource management. SDN has suited the practical standard for FC systems. The priority and differential flow space allocation have been applied to arrange this framework for the heterogeneous request in Machine-Type-Communications. The delay-sensitive flows are assigned to a configuration of priority queues on each Fog. Due to limited resources in the Fog, a promising solution is offloading flows to other Fogs through a decision-based SDN controller. The flow-based Fog nodes have been modeled according to the queueing theory, where polling priority algorithms have been applied to service the flows and to reduce the starvation problem in a multi-queueing model. It is observed that the percentage of delay-sensitive processed flows, the network consumption, and the average service time in the proposed mechanism are improved by about 80%, 65%, and 60%, respectively, compared to traditional Cloud computing. Therefore, the delay reductions based on the types of flows and task offloading is proposed.

Computing Offloading Strategy in Mobile Edge Computing Environment: A Comparison between Adopted Frameworks, Challenges, and Future Directions

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the development of wireless communication technologies such as 5G, new types of services are emerging and mobile data traffic is growing exponentially. The mobile computing model has shifted from traditional cloud computing to mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure QoS. The main feature of MEC is to “sink” network resources to the edge of the network to meet the needs of delay-sensitive and computation-intensive services, and to provide users with better services. Computation offloading is one of the major research issues in MEC. In this paper, we summarize the state of the art in task offloading in MEC. First, we introduce the basic concepts and typical application scenarios of MEC, and then we formulate the task offloading problem. In this paper, we analyze and summarize the state of research in the industry in terms of key technologies, schemes, scenarios, and objectives. Finally, we provide an outlook on the challenges and future research directions of computational offloading techniques and indicate the suggested direction of follow-up research work.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Video Offloading and Resource Allocation in NOMA-Enabled Networks

With the proliferation of video surveillance system deployment and related applications, real-time video analysis is very critical to achieving intelligent monitoring, autonomous driving, etc. Analyzing video stream with high accuracy and low latency through the traditional cloud computing represents a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based edge real-time video analysis framework with one edge server (ES) and multiple user equipments (UEs). A cost minimization problem composed of delay, energy and accuracy is formulated to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of the UEs. In order to efficiently solve this problem, we propose the joint video frame resolution scaling, task offloading, and resource allocation algorithm based on the Deep Q-Learning Network (JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN), which effectively overcomes the sparsity of the single-layer reward function and accelerates the training convergence speed. JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN consists of two DQN networks to reduce the curse of dimensionality, which, respectively, select the offloading and resource allocation action, as well as the resolution scaling action. The experimental results show that JVFRS-TO-RA-DQN can effectively reduce the cost of edge computing and has better performance in terms of convergence compared to other baseline schemes.

A many‐objective optimization based intelligent algorithm for virtual machine migration in mobile edge computing

SummaryWith the rapid development of big data, the explosive growth of data promotes the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT). Because it is hard for traditional cloud computing to meet vast computing tasks, scholars propose mobile edge computing (MEC) for the IoT. However, the mobility of users results in the instability of MEC performance. Besides, the conflict of interest between users and service providers needs to be balanced. To solve these problems, this paper constructs a virtual machine migration model based on many‐objective optimization (MaOVMMM). In MaOVMMM, four objectives are considered simultaneously: communication expense, computing expense, delay, and energy consumption. A many‐objective evolutionary algorithm with double population confrontation (MaOEA‐DPC) is suggested to support the MaOVMMM that is proposed. First, the population confrontation strategy is designed to better simulate the relationship between users and service providers. Second, the dynamic probability integration selection strategy is used to ensure the evolution ability of the algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MaOEA‐DPC when compared with other algorithms. This proposed approach can provide a superior virtual machine migration scheme for decision‐makers.

A Novel ST-ViBe Algorithm for Satellite Fog Detection at Dawn and Dusk

Satellite remote sensing provides a potential technology for detecting fog at dawn and dusk on a large scale. However, the spectral characteristics of fog at dawn and dusk are similar to those of the ground surface, which makes satellite-based fog detection difficult. With the aid of time-series datasets from the Himawari-8 (H8)/AHI, this study proposed a novel algorithm of the self-adaptive threshold of visual background extractor (ST-ViBe) model for satellite fog detection at dawn and dusk. Methodologically, the background model was first built using the difference between MIR and TIR (BTD) and the local binary similarity patterns (LBSP) operator. Second, BTD and scale invariant local ternary pattern (SILTP) texture features were coupled to form scene factors, and the detection threshold of each pixel was determined adaptively to eliminate the influence of the solar zenith angles. The background model was updated rapidly by accelerating the updating rate and increasing the updating quantity. Finally, the residual clouds were removed with the traditional cloud removal method to achieve accurate detection of fog at dawn and dusk over a large area. The validation results demonstrated that the ST-ViBe algorithm could detect fog at dawn and dusk precisely, and on a large scale. The probability of detection, false alarm ratio, and critical success index were 72.5%, 18.5%, 62.4% at dawn (8:00) and 70.6%, 33.6%, 52.3% at dusk (17:00), respectively. Meanwhile, the algorithm mitigated the limitations of the traditional algorithms, such as illumination mutation, missing detection, and residual shadow. The results of this study could guide satellite fog detection at dawn and dusk and improve the detection of similar targets.

An Approach from Internet of Things to Cloud of Things using Fog Computing

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is an increasing demand for real-time data processing and analysis. However, the traditional cloud computing architecture is not well-suited for IoT applications due to its inherent limitations such as high latency, limited bandwidth, and high-power consumption. Fog computing has emerged as a promising solution that brings computation and storage capabilities closer to the edge of the network. This paper explores the transition from IoT to Cloud of Things (CoT) using Fog computing. We discuss the benefits and challenges of Fog computing and analyse its architecture and components. Additionally, we examine various use cases of Fog computing and discuss their advantages and limitations. We conclude by highlighting the potential of Fog computing to enable the transition from IoT to CoT

ARToolKit Target Tracking and Animation Fusion Technology Based on Edge Computing and Augmented Reality

Since the beginning of the 21st century, computer network technology has been developing at a rapid speed. Many things that people thought were remote or even impossible 10 years ago can now become a reality, such as AR. AR is augmented reality. After simulating computer-generated text, image, 3D models, music, video, and other virtual information and applied to the real world, the two kinds of information complement each other, so as to achieve the “enhancement” of the real world. AR is augmented reality, a new field that is currently emerging. Using AR technology can add a realistic and virtual atmosphere to the real environment, giving users a better visual experience. Edge computing is a more efficient algorithm based on cloud computing. Traditional cloud computing, which requires all terminal devices to go from the cloud to the edge, consumes more energy and time, while using edge computing is more efficient. Applying edge computing to AR can render videos and pictures in real time, giving users a better experience. This paper is aimed at studying the ARToolKit target tracking and animation fusion technology based on edge computing and augmented reality and using this technology to propose and design an AR computing edge model. And compared with the traditional AR technology, the final experimental results show that the use of ARToolKit target tracking and animation fusion technology based on edge computing and augmented reality can reduce the minimum delay time by 1/3 compared with traditional cloud computing. The signal-to-noise ratio of the fused animation effect is significantly increased. Compared with the traditional gray value fusion, it only needs 1/2 of the number of calculations to achieve the same fusion effect.

GF-1/6 Satellite Pixel-by-Pixel Quality Tagging Algorithm

The Landsat and Sentinel series satellites contain their own quality tagging data products, marking the source image pixel by pixel with several specific semantic categories. These data products generally contain categories such as cloud, cloud shadow, land, water body, and snow. Due to the lack of mid-wave and thermal infrared bands, the accuracy of traditional cloud detection algorithm is unstable when facing Chinese Gaofen-1/6 (GF-1/6) data. Moreover, it is challenging to distinguish clouds from snow. In order to produce GF-1/6 satellite pixel-by-pixel quality tagging data products, this paper builds a training sample set of more than 100,000 image pairs, primarily using Sentinel-2 satellite data. Then, we adopt the Swin Transformer model with a self-attention mechanism for GF-1/6 satellite image quality tagging. Experiments show that the model’s overall accuracy reaches the level of Fmask v4.6 with more than 10,000 training samples, and the model can distinguish between cloud and snow correctly. Our GF-1/6 quality tagging algorithm can meet the requirements of the “Analysis Ready Data (ARD) Technology Research for Domestic Satellite” project.

Local edge computing for radiological image reconstruction and computer-assisted detection: A feasibility study

Computational requirements for data processing at different stages of the radiology value chain are increasing. Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is a diagnostic imaging technique used in dental and extremity imaging, involving a highly demanding image reconstruction task. In turn, artificial intelligence (AI) assisted diagnostics are becoming increasingly popular, thus increasing the use of computation resources. Furthermore, the need for fully independent imaging units outside radiology departments and with remotely performed diagnostics emphasize the need for wireless connectivity between the imaging unit and hospital infrastructure. In this feasibility study, we propose an approach based on a distributed edge-cloud computing platform, consisting of small-scale local edge nodes, edge servers with traditional cloud resources to perform data processing tasks in radiology. We are interested in the use of local computing resources with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), in our case Jetson Xavier NX, for hosting the algorithms for two use-cases, namely image reconstruction in cone beam computed tomography and AI-assisted cancer detection from mammographic images. Particularly, we wanted to determine the technical requirements for local edge computing platform for these two tasks and whether CBCT image reconstruction and breast cancer detection tasks are possible in a diagnostically acceptable time frame. We validated the use-cases and the proposed edge computing platform in two stages. First, the algorithms were validated use-case-wise by comparing the computing performance of the edge nodes against a reference setup (regular workstation). Second, we performed qualitative evaluation on the edge computing platform by running the algorithms as nanoservices. Our results, obtained through real-life prototyping, indicate that it is possible and technically feasible to run both reconstruction and AI-assisted image analysis functions in a diagnostically acceptable computing time. Furthermore, based on the qualitative evaluation, we confirmed that the local edge computing capacity can be scaled up and down during runtime by adding or removing edge devices without the need for manual reconfigurations. We also found all previously implemented software components to be transferable as such. Overall, the results are promising and help in developing future applications, e.g., in mobile imaging scenarios, where such a platform is beneficial.

Lightweight Edge Intelligence Empowered Near-Crash Detection Towards Real-Time Vehicle Event Logging

A major role of automated vehicles is that vehicles serve as mobile sensors for event detection and data collection, which support tactical automation in autonomous driving and post-analysis for traffic safety. However, most data collected during regular operations of vehicles are not of interest, while it costs a large amount of computation, communication, and storage resources on the cloud servers. Vehicular edge computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to balance these high costs in traditional cloud computing. But edge computers often have limited resources to support the high efficiency and intelligence of advanced vehicular functions. Motivated by the existing challenges and new concepts, this paper proposes and tests a lightweight edge intelligence framework for vehicle event detection and logging that runs in an event-based and real-time manner. Specifically, this paper takes vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-pedestrian near-crashes as the events of interest. The lightweight algorithm design of modeling the bounding boxes in object detection/tracking enables real-time edge intelligence onboard a vehicle; The event-based data logging mechanism eliminates redundant data onboard and integrates multi-source information for individual near-crash events. Comprehensive open-road tests on four transit vehicles have been conducted.

Approximated Assignment Algorithms for Unordered and Ordered Tasks in Data Shared MEC Systems

The appearance of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) successfully solves the bottlenecks of traditional Cloud based networks. Since mobile edges, e.g., base stations, and mobile devices have certain data processing capabilities, it is not necessary to offload all the tasks to the cloud for handling. Therefore, it is quite important to decide the optimal task assignment in MEC systems, and a series of algorithms have been proposed. However, the existing algorithms ignored the data distribution during task assignment, so that their applied ranges are quite limit. Considering the data sharing is quite important in a MEC system, this paper studies task assignment algorithms in Data Shared Mobile Edge Computing Systems in detail. Specifically, three algorithms are proposed to deal with the unordered and ordered holistic tasks respectively. Meanwhile, the situation that the tasks are divisible is also considered, and two algorithms for rearranging the divisible tasks are proposed for different optimization goals. The hardness of the problem, the correctness, complexities, and ratio bounds of the proposed algorithms are analyzed theoretically. Finally, extensive experimental results are carried out. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that all the proposed algorithms have high performance in terms of latency, satisfied rate, and energy consumption.

Intrusion Detection-Data Security Protection Scheme Based on Particle Swarm-BP Network Algorithm in Cloud Computing Environment

Aiming at the problems of low detection rate and high false detection rate of intrusion detection algorithms in the traditional cloud computing environment, an intrusion detection-data security protection scheme based on particle swarm-BP network algorithm in a cloud computing environment is proposed. First, based on the four modules of data collection, data preprocessing, feature selection, and intrusion detection, the overall framework of the intrusion detection model is constructed by designing corresponding functions. Then, by introducing the decision tree algorithm, the overfitting is reduced and the data processing speed of the model is improved, and on this basis, the feature selection is carried out through the “gain rate” optimization method, which reduces the redundant information of the feature vector. Finally, by introducing the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm into the optimization of the initial weights and thresholds of the BP neural network, the BP neural network is improved based on the momentum factor and adaptive learning rate, and the high detection rate and low false detection rate are realized. Through simulation experiments, the proposed intrusion detection method and the other three methods are compared and analyzed under the same conditions. The results show that the detection rate and false detection rate of the method proposed in this paper are the best under five different types of sample data, the highest detection rate reaches 95.72%, and the lowest false detection rate drops to 2.03%. The performance of the proposed algorithm is better than that of the other two comparison algorithms.

Fog computing security: A review

AbstractFog computing, also known as edge computing, is a decentralized computing architecture that brings computing and data storage closer to the users and devices that need it. It offers several advantages over traditional cloud computing, such as lower latency, improved reliability, and enhanced security. As the Internet of Things continues to grow, the demand for fog computing is also increasing, making it an important topic for research and development. However, the deployment of fog computing also brings new technical challenges and security risks. For example, fog nodes are often deployed in resource‐constrained environments and are exposed to potential security threats, such as malware and attacks on devices connected to the network. In addition, the decentralized nature of fog computing creates new challenges in terms of privacy, security, and data management. This survey aims to address these technical challenges and research gaps in the field of fog computing security. It provides an overview of the current state of fog computing and its security challenges, and identifies key areas for future research. The survey also highlights the importance of fog computing security and the need for continued investment in this area in order to fully realize the potential of this promising technology.

Multi-objective edge server placement using the whale optimization algorithm and game theory

Due to the users’ mobility, new online applications, as well as low processing power and limited energy of smart devices, traditional cloud computing models could not provide new required services. Cloud service providers improve the quality of their services by moving some servers to the edge of the network and closer to mobile users. Considering the moving nature of users and the heterogeneous service demands in different areas, the optimal placement of servers plays an important role in increasing the quality of service provided to users. However, because of the large number of servers, finding the optimal location of these resources is a serious challenge. In the proposed method of this paper (MES-WG), in the first step, the geographical area of server deployment is divided into smaller sub-regions to reduce the complexity of the problem. Then, by using the WOA algorithm the search agent finds the optimal location of the servers. In the next step, a neural network is used for the local placement of all servers in each area. Finally, game theory is deployed for the convergence of resource placement in all sub-regions. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the network latency by 33.5% and also improves the load balance on servers by 28.2%, compared to some of the state-of-the-art methods.

Guest Editorial Multi-Tier Computing for Next Generation Wireless Networks—Part II

Multi-tier computing effectively enables flexible computation and communication resource sharing by offloading computation-intensive tasks to nearby servers along the cloud-to-thing continuum. In essence, multi-tier computing networks can distribute computing, storage, and communication functions anywhere between the cloud and the endpoint to take full advantage of the resources available along this continuum, thus extending the traditional cloud computing architecture to the edge of the network. With multi-tier computing, some application component processing, such as delay-sensitive components, can take place at the edge of the network, while other components, such as time-tolerant and computation-intensive components, can be performed in the cloud. To best meet user requirements, centralized cloud computing with extensive resources, secure environments, and powerful algorithms is still needed, but also must be complemented by distributed fog and edge computing with shared resources, accessible environments, and simple algorithms for real-time decision-making. Given heterogeneous computing resources and collaborative service architectures, future multi-tier computing networks will be capable of supporting a full range of computing and networking services for different environments and applications. Multi-tier computing enables low-latency processing by allowing data to be processed at the network edge close to end devices. It also facilitates the distribution of fog/edge nodes to collect data from end devices. Therefore, multi-tier computing effectively complements the cloud computing architecture.