A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Collaborative Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Service Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a recently introduced paradigm aiming at extending the Internet of Things (IoT) toward the vehicular scenario in order to cope with its specific requirements. Nowadays, there are several types of vehicles, with different characteristics, requested services, and delivered data types. In order to efficiently manage such heterogeneity, Edge Computing facilities are often deployed in the urban environment, usually co-located with the Roadside Units (RSUs), for creating what is referenced as Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC). In this paper, we consider a joint network selection and computation offloading optimization problem in multi-service VEC environments, aiming at minimizing the overall latency and the consumed energy in an IoV scenario. Two novel collaborative Q-learning based approaches are proposed, where Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication paradigms are exploited, respectively. In the first approach, we define a collaborative Q-learning method in which, through V2I communications, several vehicles participate in the training process of a centralized Q-agent. In the second approach, by exploiting the V2V communications, each vehicle is made aware of the surrounding environment and the potential offloading neighbors, leading to better decisions in terms of network selection and offloading. In addition to the tabular method, an advanced deep learning-based approach is also used for the action value estimation, allowing to handle more complex vehicular scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches improve the network performance in terms of latency and consumed energy with respect to some benchmark solutions

Collaborative Vehicular Edge Computing Networks: Architecture Design and Research Challenges

The emergence of augmented reality (AR), autonomous driving and other new applications have greatly enriched the functionality of the vehicular networks. However, these applications usually require complex calculations and large amounts of storage, which puts tremendous pressure on traditional vehicular networks. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is proposed as a prospective technique to extend computing and storage resources to the edge of the network. Combined with MEC, the computing and storage capabilities of the vehicular network can be further enhanced. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the novel collaborative vehicular edge computing network (CVECN) architecture. We first review the work related to MEC and vehicular networks. Then we discuss the design principles of CVECN. Based on the principles, we present the detailed CVECN architecture, and introduce the corresponding functional modules, communication process, as well as the installation and deployment ideas. Furthermore, the promising technical challenges, including collaborative coalition formation, collaborative task offloading and mobility management, are presented. And some potential research issues for future research are highlighted. Finally, simulation results are verified that the proposed CVECN can significantly improve network performance

Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks

Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing capabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), which provides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging mobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limited computation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services of high quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloaded with an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we propose collaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to share computation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computation workload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novel SBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional game theory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems, including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services, cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address these challenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBS association stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultra dense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism that implements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions, and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSs due to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carried out to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, which shows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.4501 by other author