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

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Spatio-temporal Edge Service Placement: A Bandit Learning Approach

Shared edge computing platforms deployed at the radio access network are expected to significantly improve quality of service delivered by Application Service Providers (ASPs) in a flexible and economic way. However, placing edge service in every possible edge site by an ASP is practically infeasible due to the ASP's prohibitive budget requirement. In this paper, we investigate the edge service placement problem of an ASP under a limited budget, where the ASP dynamically rents computing/storage resources in edge sites to host its applications in close proximity to end users. Since the benefit of placing edge service in a specific site is usually unknown to the ASP a priori, optimal placement decisions must be made while learning this benefit. We pose this problem as a novel combinatorial contextual bandit learning problem. It is "combinatorial" because only a limited number of edge sites can be rented to provide the edge service given the ASP's budget. It is "contextual" because we utilize user context information to enable finer-grained learning and decision making. To solve this problem and optimize the edge computing performance, we propose SEEN, a Spatial-temporal Edge sErvice placemeNt algorithm. Furthermore, SEEN is extended to scenarios with overlapping service coverage by incorporating a disjunctively constrained knapsack problem. In both cases, we prove that our algorithm achieves a sublinear regret bound when it is compared to an oracle algorithm that knows the exact benefit information. Simulations are carried out on a real-world dataset, whose results show that SEEN significantly outperforms benchmark solutions

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi