关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to meet ever-increasing resource demands of mobile users, prolong battery lives of mobile devices, and shorten request response delays experienced by users. An MEC environment consists of many MEC servers and ubiquitous access points interconnected into an edge cloud network. Mobile users can offload their computing-intensive tasks to one or multiple MEC servers for execution to save their batteries. Due to large numbers of MEC servers deployed in MEC, selecting a subset of servers to serve user tasks while satisfying delay requirements of their users is challenging. In this paper, we formulate a novel delay-energy joint optimization problem through jointly considering the CPU-cycle frequency scheduling at mobile devices, server selection to serve user offloading tasks, and task allocations to the selected servers. To this end, we first formulate the problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming, due to the hardness to solve this nonlinear programming, we instead then relax the problem into a nonlinear programming problem that can be solved in polynomial time. We also show how to derive a feasible solution to the original problem from the solution of this relaxed solution. We finally conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is promising. Copyright © 2018, The Authors. All rights reserved.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： We envision a mobile edge computing (MEC) framework for machine learning (ML) technologies, which leverages distributed client data and computation resources for training high-performance ML models while preserving client privacy. Toward this future goal, this work aims to extend Federated Learning (FL), a decentralized learning framework that enables privacy-preserving training of models, to work with heterogeneous clients in a practical cellular network. The FL protocol iteratively asks random clients to download a trainable model from a server, update it with own data, and upload the updated model to the server, while asking the server to aggregate multiple client updates to further improve the model. While clients in this protocol are free from disclosing own private data, the overall training process can become inefficient when some clients are with limited computational resources (i.e., requiring longer update time) or under poor wireless channel conditions (longer upload time). Our new FL protocol, which we refer to as FedCS, mitigates this problem and performs FL efficiently while actively managing clients based on their resource conditions. Specifically, FedCS solves a client selection problem with resource constraints, which allows the server to aggregate as many client updates as possible and to accelerate performance improvement in ML models. We conducted an experimental evaluation using publicly-available large-scale image datasets to train deep neural networks on MEC environment simulations. The experimental results show that FedCS is able to complete its training process in a significantly shorter time compared to the original FL protocol. Copyright © 2018, The Authors. All rights reserved.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： This paper considers the coexistence of two important communication techniques, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile edge computing (MEC). Both NOMA uplink and downlink transmissions are applied to MEC, and analytical results are developed to demonstrate that the use of NOMA can efficiently reduce the latency and energy consumption of MEC offloading. In addition, various asymptotic studies are carried out to reveal the impact of the users' channel conditions and transmit powers on the application of NOMA to MEC is quite different to those in conventional NOMA scenarios. Computer simulation results are also provided to facilitate the performance evaluation of NOMA-MEC and also verify the accuracy of the developed analytical results. Copyright © 2018, The Authors. All rights reserved.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   user cooperation   wireless power transfer   energy consumption   resource management  

摘要： This paper studies a mobile edge computing (MEC) system in which two mobile devices are energized by the wireless power transfer (WPT) from an access point (AP) and they can offload part or all of their computation-intensive latency-critical tasks to the AP connected with an MEC server or an edge cloud. This harvest-then-offload protocol operates in an optimized time-division manner. To overcome the doubly near-far effect for the farther mobile device, cooperative communications in the form of relaying via the nearer mobile device is considered for offloading. Our aim is to minimize the AP's total transmit energy subject to the constraints of the computational tasks. We illustrate that the optimization is equivalent to a min-max problem, which can be optimally solved by a two-phase method. The first phase obtains the optimal offloading decisions by solving a sum-energy-saving maximization problem for given an energy transmit power. In the second phase, the optimal minimum energy transmit power is obtained by a bisection search method. Numerical results demonstrate that the optimized MEC system utilizing cooperation has significant performance improvement over systems without cooperation.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) will play a key role in next-generation mobile networks to extend the range of supported delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, an increasing attention is paid to provide user-centric services, to better address the strict requirements of novel immersive applications. In this scenario, MEC solutions need to efficiently cope with user mobility, which requires fast relocation of service instances to guarantee the desired Quality of Experience. However, service migration is still an open issue, especially for resource-constrained edge nodes interconnected by high-latency and low-bandwidth links. In this paper, by leveraging the potential of lightweight container-based virtualization techniques, we investigate a novel approach to support service provisioning in dynamic MEC environments. In particular, we present a framework where proactive service replication for stateless applications is exploited to drastically reduce the time of service migration between different cloudlets and to meet the latency requirements. The performance evaluation shows promising results of our approach with respect to classic reactive service migration.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that mobile devices can offload the computation-intensive or latency-critical tasks to the nearby MEC servers, so as to save energy and extend battery life. Unlike the cloud server, MEC server is a small-scale data center deployed at a wireless access point, thus it is highly sensitive to both radio and computing resource. In this paper, we consider an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) based multi-user and multi-MEC-server system, where the task offloading strategies and wireless resources allocation are jointly investigated. Aiming at minimizing the total energy consumption, we propose the joint offloading and resource allocation strategy for latency-critical applications. Through the bi-level optimization approach, the original NP-hard problem is decoupled into the lower-level problem seeking for the allocation of power and subcarrier and the upper-level task offloading problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent performance in energy saving and successful offloading probability (SOP) in comparison with conventional schemes. Copyright © 2018, The Authors. All rights reserved.

关键词： Integrity preservation   Mobile edge computing   Top-k query   Two-tiered mobile wireless sensor networks  

摘要： A novel network paradigm of mobile edge computing, namely TMWSNs (two-tiered mobile wireless sensor networks), has just been proposed by researchers in recent years for its high scalability and robustness. However, only a few works have considered the security of TMWSNs. In fact, the storage nodes, which are located at the upper layer of TMWSNs, are prone to being attacked by the adversaries because they play a key role in bridging both the sensor nodes and the sink, which may lead to the disclosure of all data stored on them as well as some other potentially devastating results. In this paper, we make a comparative study on two typical schemes, EVTopk and VTMSN, which have been proposed recently for securing Top-k queries in TMWSNs, through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, aiming at finding out their disadvantages and advancements. We find that both schemes unsatisfactorily raise communication costs. Specifically, the extra communication cost brought about by transmitting the proof information uses up more than 40% of the total communication cost between the sensor nodes and the storage nodes, and 80% of that between the storage nodes and the sink. We discuss the corresponding reasons and present our suggestions, hoping that it will inspire the researchers researching this subject. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

关键词： Internet of Things   mobile edge computing   cloudlet   semantics   social network   green energy  

摘要： In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Internet of Things (MEIoT) architecture by leveraging the fiber-wireless access technology, the cloudlet concept, and the software defined networking framework. The MEIoT architecture brings computing and storage resources close to Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to speed up IoT data sharing and analytics. Specifically, the IoT devices (belonging to the same user) are associated to a specific proxy Virtual Machine (VM) in the nearby cloudlet. The proxy VM stores and analyzes the IoT data (generated by its IoT devices) in real-time. Moreover, we introduce the semantic and social IoT technology in the context of MEIoT to solve the interoperability and inefficient access control problem in the IoT system. In addition, we propose two dynamic proxy VM migration methods to minimize the end-to-end delay between proxy VMs and their IoT devices and to minimize the total on-grid energy consumption of the cloudlets, respectively. Performance of the proposed methods is validated via extensive simulations.

关键词： Software defined networking   mobile edge computing   task offloading   resource allocation  

摘要： With the development of recent innovative applications (e.g., augment reality, self-driving, and various cognitive applications), more and more computation-intensive and data-intensive tasks are delay-sensitive. Mobile edge computing in ultra-dense network is expected as an effective solution for meeting the low latency demand. However, the distributed computing resource in edge cloud and energy dynamics in the battery of mobile device makes it challenging to offload tasks for users. In this paper, leveraging the idea of software defined network, we investigate the task offloading problem in ultra-dense network aiming to minimize the delay while saving the battery life of user's equipment. Specifically, we formulate the task offloading problem as a mixed integer non-linear program which is NP-hard. In order to solve it, we transform this optimization problem into two sub-problems, i.e., task placement sub-problem and resource allocation sub-problem. Based on the solution of the two sub-problems, we propose an efficient offloading scheme. Simulation results prove that the proposed scheme can reduce 20% of the task duration with 30% energy saving, compared with random and uniform task offloading schemes.

关键词： mobile edge computing   two-tiered mobile wireless sensor networks   top-k query   integrity preservation  

摘要： A novel network paradigm of mobile edge computing, namely TMWSNs (two-tiered mobile wireless sensor networks), has just been proposed by researchers in recent years for its high scalability and robustness. However, only a few works have considered the security of TMWSNs. In fact, the storage nodes, which are located at the upper layer of TMWSNs, are prone to being attacked by the adversaries because they play a key role in bridging both the sensor nodes and the sink, which may lead to the disclosure of all data stored on them as well as some other potentially devastating results. In this paper, we make a comparative study on two typical schemes, EVTopk and VTMSN, which have been proposed recently for securing Top-k queries in TMWSNs, through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, aiming at finding out their disadvantages and advancements. We find that both schemes unsatisfactorily raise communication costs. Specifically, the extra communication cost brought about by transmitting the proof information uses up more than 40% of the total communication cost between the sensor nodes and the storage nodes, and 80% of that between the storage nodes and the sink. We discuss the corresponding reasons and present our suggestions, hoping that it will inspire the researchers researching this subject.