Secure and Sustainable Load Balancing of Edge Data Centers in Fog Computing

© 1979-2012 IEEE. Fog computing is a recent research trend to bring cloud computing services to network edges. EDCs are deployed to decrease the latency and network congestion by processing data streams and user requests in near real time. EDC deployment is distributed in nature and positioned between cloud data centers and data sources. Load balancing is the process of redistributing the work load among EDCs to improve both resource utilization and job response time. Load balancing also avoids a situation where some EDCs are heavily loaded while others are in idle state or doing little data processing. In such scenarios, load balancing between the EDCs plays a vital role for user response and real-Time event detection. As the EDCs are deployed in an unattended environment, secure authentication of EDCs is an important issue to address before performing load balancing. This article proposes a novel load balancing technique to authenticate the EDCs and find less loaded EDCs for task allocation. The proposed load balancing technique is more efficient than other existing approaches in finding less loaded EDCs for task allocation. The proposed approach not only improves efficiency of load balancing; it also strengthens the security by authenticating the destination EDCs

Truthful Computation Offloading Mechanisms for Edge Computing

Edge computing (EC) is a promising paradigm providing a distributed computing solution for users at the edge of the network. Preserving satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) for users when offloading their computation to EC is a non-trivial problem. Computation offloading in EC requires jointly optimizing access points (APs) allocation and edge service placement for users, which is computationally intractable due to its combinatorial nature. Moreover, users are self-interested, and they can misreport their preferences leading to inefficient resource allocation and network congestion. In this paper, we tackle this problem and design a novel mechanism based on algorithmic mechanism design to implement a system equilibrium. Our mechanism assigns a proper pair of AP and edge server along with a service price for each new joining user maximizing the instant social surplus while satisfying all users' preferences in the EC system. Declaring true preferences is a weakly dominant strategy for the users. The experimental results show that our mechanism outperforms user equilibrium and random selection strategies in terms of the experienced end-to-end latency

Efficient Three-stage Auction Schemes for Cloudlets Deployment in Wireless Access Network

Cloudlet deployment and resource allocation for mobile users (MUs) have been extensively studied in existing works for computation resource scarcity. However, most of them failed to jointly consider the two techniques together, and the selfishness of cloudlet and access point (AP) are ignored. Inspired by the group-buying mechanism, this paper proposes three-stage auction schemes by combining cloudlet placement and resource assignment, to improve the social welfare subject to the economic properties. We first divide all MUs into some small groups according to the associated APs. Then the MUs in same group can trade with cloudlets in a group-buying way through the APs. Finally, the MUs pay for the cloudlets if they are the winners in the auction scheme. We prove that our auction schemes can work in polynomial time. We also provide the proofs for economic properties in theory. For the purpose of performance comparison, we compare the proposed schemes with HAF, which is a centralized cloudlet placement scheme without auction. Numerical results confirm the correctness and efficiency of the proposed schemes.Comment: 22 pages,12 figures, Accepted by Wireless Network

VNF placement optimization at the edge and cloud

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way network services are offered to end users. Individual network functions are decoupled from expensive and dedicated middleboxes and are now provided as software-based virtualized entities called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). NFV is often complemented with the Cloud Computing paradigm to provide networking functions t