关键词： Federated learning   differential privacy   communication round   mobile edge computing  

摘要： Federated learning (FL), as a type of collaborative machine learning framework, is capable of preserving private data from mobile terminals (MTs) while training the data into useful models. Nevertheless, from a viewpoint of information theory, it is still possible for a curious server to infer private information from the shared models uploaded by MTs. To address this problem, we first make use of the concept of local differential privacy (LDP), and propose a user-level differential privacy (UDP) algorithm by adding artificial noise to the shared models before uploading them to servers. According to our analysis, the UDP framework can realize (is an element of(i), delta(i))-LDP for the ith MT with adjustable privacy protection levels by varying the variances of the artificial noise processes. We then derive a theoretical convergence upper-bound for the UDP algorithm. It reveals that there exists an optimal number of communication rounds to achieve the best learning performance. More importantly, we propose a communication rounds discounting (CRD) method. Compared with the heuristic search method, the proposed CRD method can achieve a much better trade-off between the computational complexity of searching and the convergence performance. Extensive experiments indicate that our UDP algorithm using the proposed CRD method can effectively improve both the training efficiency and model quality for the given privacy protection levels.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   deep reinforcement learning   multi-classification   time delay   energy consumption   intelligent inspection swarm   swarm head  

摘要： In meteorological and electric power Internet of Things scenarios, in order to extend the service life of relevant facilities and reduce the cost of emergency repair, the intelligent inspection swarm is introduced to cooperate with monitoring tasks, which collect and process the current scene data through a variety of sensors and cameras, and complete tasks such as emergency handling and fault inspection. Due to the limitation of computing resources and battery life of patrol inspection equipment, it will cause problems such as slow response in emergency and long time for fault location. Mobile Edge Computing is a promising technology, which can improve the quality of service of the swarm by offloading the computing task of the inspection equipment to the edge server nearby the network. In this paper, we study the problem of computing offloading of multidevices multi-tasks and multi-servers in the intelligent patrol inspection swarm under the condition of a dynamic network environment and limited resources of servers and inspection equipment. An effective adaptive learning offloading strategy based on distributed reinforcement learning and multi-classification is proposed to reduce the task processing delay and energy consumption of the intelligent inspection swarm and improve the service quality. Numerical experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is superior to other offloading strategies in terms of time delay, energy consumption and quality of service.

关键词： Authentication   Servers   3GPP   Cellular networks   Prefetching   Long Term Evolution   Multi-access edge computing   Mobile edge computing   multi-access edge computing   authentication   mobility   latency   3GPP cellular networks  

摘要： Multi-Access or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is being deployed by 4G/5G operators to provide computational services at lower latencies. Federating MECs across operators expands capability, capacity, and coverage but gives rise to two issues for continuous service during roaming without re-authentication-third-party authentication and application mobility. In this work, we propose a Federated State transfer and 3rd-party Authentication (FS3A) mechanism that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the information of both authentication and application state across operators to resolve these issues. The FS3A proxy is kept transparent with virtual counterparts to avoid any changes to existing MEC and cellular architectures. FS3A provides users with a token which, when authenticated by an MEC, can be reused across operators for faster authentication. Prefetching of subscription and state is also proposed to further reduce authentication and application mobility latencies. We evaluated FS3A on an OpenAirInterface (OAI)-based testbed and the results show that token reuse and subscription prefetching reduce the authentication latency by 53-65%, compared to complete re-authentication, while state prefetching reduces application mobility latency by 51-91%, compared to no prefetching. Overall, FS3A reduces the service interruption time by 33%, compared to no token reuse and prefetching.

关键词： mobile edge computing   edge server placement   cost   access delay  

摘要： As an urgent problem to be solved, the placement of edge server is the first step in the implementation of mobile edge computing. In practice, service providers always hope to provide services to as many users as they can under the limited funds. In this paper, we aim to study the cost-aware server placement issue for a real-world scenario with access delay guarantee. Considering the network workload, we set an affordable upper limit on the maximum number of base stations. The server placement is then modelled as a mix integer nonlinear programming problem, which is proved to be NP-hard. To solve this problem with reduced computation complexity, we propose a biogeography-based optimisation algorithm. Extensive simulations on the real-world dataset from Shanghai Telecom show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other benchmarks in terms of the total placement cost and average user access delay.

关键词： Cloud computing   Resource management   Servers   Quality of service   5G mobile communication   Virtualization   Real-time systems   Mobile edge computing   MEC infrastructure design and dimensioning   mobile network operator   optimization approaches   proactive   resource management   virtualization   NFV   VNF autoscaling   VNF placement  

摘要： 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.

关键词： Cloud computing   Servers   Vehicle dynamics   Resource management   Wireless fidelity   Taxonomy   Task analysis   Mobile edge computing   decentralised cloud   MEC server   service caching   service offloading   computational offloading   service deployment   resource management   service orchestration  

摘要： The advent of new cloud-based applications such as mixed reality, online gaming, autonomous driving, and healthcare has introduced infrastructure management challenges to the underlying service network. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) extends the cloud computing paradigm and leverages servers near end-users at the network edge to provide a cloud-like environment. The optimum placement of services on edge servers plays a crucial role in the performance of such service-based applications. Dynamic service placement problem addresses the adaptive configuration of application services at edge servers to facilitate end-users and those devices that need to offload computation tasks. While reported approaches in the literature shed light on this problem from a particular perspective, a panoramic study of this problem reveals the research gaps in the big picture. This paper introduces the dynamic service placement problem and outline its relations with other problems such as task scheduling, resource management, and caching at the edge. We also present a systematic literature review of existing dynamic service placement methods for MEC environments from networking, middleware, applications, and evaluation perspectives. In the first step, we review different MEC architectures and their enabling technologies from a networking point of view. We also introduce different cache deployment solutions in network architectures and discuss their design considerations. The second step investigates dynamic service placement methods from a middleware viewpoint. We review different service packaging technologies and discuss their trade-offs. We also survey the methods and identify eight research directions that researchers follow. Our study categorises the research objectives into six main classes, proposing a taxonomy of design objectives for the dynamic service placement problem. We also investigate the reported methods and devise a solutions taxonomy comprising six criteria. In the th

关键词： Edge federation   5G network   mobile edge computing   resource allocation   Stackelberg game   utility maximization  

摘要： Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) plays key role for providing fast-response and high interactivity in the emerging 5G network. Edge service providers (ESP) are responsible for serving edge users or IoT devices running latency-critical applications. An MEC server provides faster response to ESPs but has limited computation resources, hence, it can be overloaded due to extensive resource demand. Thus, federation of multiple MEC servers offers an opportunity for dynamic resource allocation in a distributed manner. The federation objective is to maximize the usage of underutilized edge resources and reduction of service provision time simultaneously. As all the ESPs and MECs act autonomously, it is quite impossible for all the individuals to achieve optimal behavior simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a Stackelberg Game (SBG) based dynamic resource allocation method to reach the expected performance. The SBG analyzes the pricing of MECs and the resource-purchasing problem of ESPs. We also develop a many-to-many matching algorithm for resource sharing among the MECs and a one-to-many matching algorithm for that between an MEC server and ESPs. The results from an extensive performance evaluation demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed system in increasing utilities for MECs and ESPs, reducing the turnaround time of application tasks, and ensuring fair resource distribution compared to state-of-the-art works.

关键词： Cloud computing   Mobile handsets   Edge computing   Load management   Edge computing   Bandwidth   Servers   Internet of Things   Mobile cloud computing   mobile edge computing   fog computing   cloudlet computing   Internet of things   cloud federation  

摘要： Mobile cloud computing and edge computing-based solutions provide means to offload tasks for resource-limited mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing provides remote cloud solutions while edge computing provides closer proximity-based solutions. Remote cloud solutions suffer from network latency and limited bandwidth challenges due to distance and dependency on the Internet. However, these challenges are addressed by edge-based solutions since the edge node is available in the same network. The use of Internet of Things-based solutions considering future Information Communication Technology infrastructure is on the rise resulting in the massive growth of digital equipment increasing the load at edge devices. Hence, some load balancing mechanism is required at the edge level to avoid resource congestion. The load balancing at the edge must consider the user's preferences about edge resources such as personal computers or mobile devices. A user must declare which resources can be spared for other devices to avoid overprovisioning essential resources. We present Load Balancing for Resource Optimization (LBRO), a collaborative cloudlet platform to address load balancing challenges in edge computing considering users' preferences. A comparative analysis of the proposed approach with the conventional edge-based approach yields that the proposed approach provides significantly improved results in terms of CPU, memory, and disk utilization.

关键词： 360-degree mobile virtual reality video streaming   computation offloading   end-to-end delay   field-of-view prediction   mobile edge computing   proactive caching  

摘要： Recently, 360-degree mobile virtual reality video (MVRV) has become increasingly popular because it can provide users with an immersive experience. However, MVRV is usually recorded in a high resolution and is sensitive to latency, which indicates that broadband, ultra-reliable, and low-latency communication is necessary to guarantee the users' quality of experience. In this paper, we propose a mobile edge computing (MEC)-based 360-degree MVRV streaming scheme with field-of-view (FoV) prediction, which jointly considers video coding, proactive caching, computation offloading, and data transmission. To meet the requirement of stringent end-to-end (E2E) latency, the user's viewpoint prediction is utilized to cache video data proactively, and computing tasks are partially offloaded to the MEC server. In addition, we propose an analytical model based on diffusion process to study the packet transmission process of 360-degree MVRV in multihop wired/wireless networks and analyze the performance of the MEC-enabled scheme. The simulation results verify the accuracy of the analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed MVRV streaming scheme in reducing the E2E delay. Furthermore, the analytical framework sheds some light on the impacts of system parameters, e.g., FoV prediction accuracy and transmission rate, on the balance between computation delay and communication delay.

关键词： Task analysis   Servers   Computational modeling   Delays   Cloud computing   Simulation   Optimization   Computation offloading   edge-cloud computing   mobile edge computing   optimization   Internet of Things   unmanned aerial vehicles   linear programming  

摘要： The emergence of delay-sensitive and computationally-intensive mobile applications and services pose a significant challenge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) devices due to the scarcity in their resources such as computational power and battery lifetime. Mobile cloud computing has been introduced as a promising solution to overcome these limitations through task offloading. However, high-latency and security issues are considered the main challenges of this paradigm. Subsequently, the edge-cloud computing paradigm has been introduced and widely used to help to mitigate these issues. Nevertheless, the current task offloading models permit UAVs to execute their intensive tasks at the connected edge server, which leads to excessive loads due to the large number of UAVs and thereby increases the delay. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a delay-optimal task offloading approach for multi-tier edge-cloud computing in a multi-user environment. The problem is formulated as an optimization model using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) techniques to minimize the total service time of UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only saves the service time by 33.5% and 55% for edge and cloud execution policies respectively, but also scales well for a large number of UAVs.