Intelligent networking with Mobile Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges for Dynamic Network Scheduling

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising technique for internet of things (IoT). By deploying edge servers at the proximity of devices, it is expected to provide services and process data at a relatively low delay by intelligent networking. However, the vast edge servers may face great challenges in terms of cooperation and resource allocation. Furthermore, intelligent networking requires online implementation in distributed mode. In such kinds of systems, the network scheduling can not follow any previously known rule due to complicated application environment. Then statistical learning rises up as a promising technique for network scheduling, where edges dynamically learn environmental elements with cooperations. It is expected such learning based methods may relieve deficiency of model limitations, which enhance their practical use in dynamic network scheduling. In this paper, we investigate the vision and challenges of the intelligent IoT networking with mobile edge computing. From the systematic viewpoint, some major research opportunities are enumerated with respect to statistical learning

Towards an Intelligent Edge: Wireless Communication Meets Machine Learning

The recent revival of artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing almost every branch of science and technology. Given the ubiquitous smart mobile gadgets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is expected that a majority of intelligent applications will be deployed at the edge of wireless networks. This trend has generated strong interests in realizing an "intelligent edge" to support AI-enabled applications at various edge devices. Accordingly, a new research area, called edge learning, emerges, which crosses and revolutionizes two disciplines: wireless communication and machine learning. A major theme in edge learning is to overcome the limited computing power, as well as limited data, at each edge device. This is accomplished by leveraging the mobile edge computing (MEC) platform and exploiting the massive data distributed over a large number of edge devices. In such systems, learning from distributed data and communicating between the edge server and devices are two critical and coupled aspects, and their fusion poses many new research challenges. This article advocates a new set of design principles for wireless communication in edge learning, collectively called learning-driven communication. Illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these design principles, and unique research opportunities are identified.Comment: submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio

A Fog-based Architecture and Programming Model for IoT Applications in the Smart Grid

The smart grid utilizes many Internet of Things (IoT) applications to support its intelligent grid monitoring and control. The requirements of the IoT applications vary due to different tasks in the smart grid. In this paper, we propose a new computing paradigm to offer location-aware, latencysensitive monitoring and intelligent control for IoT applications in the smart grid. In particular, a new fog-based architecture and programming model is designed. Fog computing extends computing to the edge of a network, which has a perfect match to IoT applications. However, existing schemes can hardly satisfy the distributed coordination within fog computing nodes in the smart grid. In the proposed model, we introduce a new distributed fog computing coordinator, which periodically gathers information of fog computing nodes, e.g., remaining resources, tasks, etc. Moreover, the fog computing coordinator also manages jobs so that all computing nodes can collaborate on complex tasks. In addition, we construct a working prototype of intelligent electric vehicle service to evaluate the proposed model. Experiment results are also presented to demonstrate that our proposed model exceed the traditional fog computing schemes for IoT applications in the smart grid

MUREN: delivering edge services in joint SDN-SDR multi-radio nodes

To meet the growing local and distributed computing needs, the cloud is now descending to the network edge and sometimes to user equipments. This approach aims at distributing computing, data processing, and networking services closer to the end users. Instead of concentrating data and computation in a small number of large clouds, many edge systems are envisioned to be deployed close to the end users or where computing and intelligent networking can best meet user needs. In this paper, we go further converging such massively distributed computing systems with multiple radio accesses. We propose an architecture called MUREN (Multi-Radio Edge Node) for managing traffic in future mobile edge networks. Our solution is based on the Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) architecture and its close interaction with Software Defined Networking (SDN), the whole jointly interacting with Software-Defined Radios (SDR). We have implemented our architecture in a proof of concept and tested it with two edge scenarios. Our experiments show that centralizing the intelligence in the MEC allows to guarantee the requirements of the edge services either by adapting the waveform parameters, or through changing the radio interface or even by reconfiguring the applications. More generally, the best decision can be seen as the optimal reaction to the wireless links variationsComment: 7 pages, 9 figure

EIQIS: Toward an Event-Oriented Indexable and Queryable Intelligent Surveillance System

Edge computing provides the ability to link distributor users for multimedia content, while retaining the power of significant data storage and access at a centralized computer. Two requirements of significance include: what information show be processed at the edge and how the content should be stored. Answers to these questions require a combination of query-based search, access, and response as well as indexed-based processing, storage, and distribution. A measure of intelligence is not what is known, but is recalled, hence, future edge intelligence must provide recalled information for dynamic response. In this paper, a novel event-oriented indexable and queryable intelligent surveillance (EIQIS) system is introduced leveraging the on-site edge devices to collect the information sensed in format of frames and extracts useful features to enhance situation awareness. The design principles are discussed and a preliminary proof-of-concept prototype is built that validated the feasibility of the proposed idea

Vehicular Edge Computing via Deep Reinforcement Learning

The smart vehicles construct Vehicle of Internet which can execute various intelligent services. Although the computation capability of the vehicle is limited, multi-type of edge computing nodes provide heterogeneous resources for vehicular services.When offloading the complicated service to the vehicular edge computing node, the decision should consider numerous factors.The offloading decision work mostly formulate the decision to a resource scheduling problem with single or multiple objective function and some constraints, and explore customized heuristics algorithms. However, offloading multiple data dependency tasks in a service is a difficult decision, as an optimal solution must understand the resource requirement, the access network, the user mobility, and importantly the data dependency. Inspired by recent advances in machine learning, we propose a knowledge driven (KD) service offloading decision framework for Vehicle of Internet, which provides the optimal policy directly from the environment. We formulate the offloading decision of multi-task in a service as a long-term planning problem, and explores the recent deep reinforcement learning to obtain the optimal solution. It considers the future data dependency of the following tasks when making decision for a current task from the learned offloading knowledge. Moreover, the framework supports the pre-training at the powerful edge computing node and continually online learning when the vehicular service is executed, so that it can adapt the environment changes and learns policy that are sensible in hindsight. The simulation results show that KD service offloading decision converges quickly, adapts to different conditions, and outperforms the greedy offloading decision algorithm.Comment: Preliminary report of ongoing wor

Real-Time Edge Intelligence in the Making: A Collaborative Learning Framework via Federated Meta-Learning

Many IoT applications at the network edge demand intelligent decisions in a real-time manner. The edge device alone, however, often cannot achieve real-time edge intelligence due to its constrained computing resources and limited local data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a platform-aided collaborative learning framework where a model is first trained across a set of source edge nodes by a federated meta-learning approach, and then it is rapidly adapted to learn a new task at the target edge node, using a few samples only. Further, we investigate the convergence of the proposed federated meta-learning algorithm under mild conditions on node similarity and the adaptation performance at the target edge. To combat against the vulnerability of meta-learning algorithms to possible adversarial attacks, we further propose a robust version of the federated meta-learning algorithm based on distributionally robust optimization, and establish its convergence under mild conditions. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Federated Meta-Learning based framework

Deep Learning for Reliable Mobile Edge Analytics in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) will be a major component of tomorrow's smart cities. However, realizing the true potential of ITSs requires ultra-low latency and reliable data analytics solutions that can combine, in real-time, a heterogeneous mix of data stemming from the ITS network and its environment. Such data analytics capabilities cannot be provided by conventional cloud-centric data processing techniques whose communication and computing latency can be high. Instead, edge-centric solutions that are tailored to the unique ITS environment must be developed. In this paper, an edge analytics architecture for ITSs is introduced in which data is processed at the vehicle or roadside smart sensor level in order to overcome the ITS latency and reliability challenges. With a higher capability of passengers' mobile devices and intra-vehicle processors, such a distributed edge computing architecture can leverage deep learning techniques for reliable mobile sensing in ITSs. In this context, the ITS mobile edge analytics challenges pertaining to heterogeneous data, autonomous control, vehicular platoon control, and cyber-physical security are investigated. Then, different deep learning solutions for such challenges are proposed. The proposed deep learning solutions will enable ITS edge analytics by endowing the ITS devices with powerful computer vision and signal processing functions. Preliminary results show that the proposed edge analytics architecture, coupled with the power of deep learning algorithms, can provide a reliable, secure, and truly smart transportation environment.Comment: 5 figure

Mobile Edge Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges

Mobile edge cloud is emerging as a promising technology to the internet of things and cyber-physical system applications such as smart home and intelligent video surveillance. In a smart home, various sensors are deployed to monitor the home environment and physiological health of individuals. The data collected by sensors are sent to an application, where numerous algorithms for emotion and sentiment detection, activity recognition and situation management are applied to provide healthcare- and emergency-related services and to manage resources at the home. The executions of these algorithms require a vast amount of computing and storage resources. To address the issue, the conventional approach is to send the collected data to an application on an internet cloud. This approach has several problems such as high communication latency, communication energy consumption and unnecessary data traffic to the core network. To overcome the drawbacks of the conventional cloud-based approach, a new system called mobile edge cloud is proposed. In mobile edge cloud, multiple mobiles and stationary devices interconnected through wireless local area networks are combined to create a small cloud infrastructure at a local physical area such as a home. Compared to traditional mobile distributed computing systems, mobile edge cloud introduces several complex challenges due to the heterogeneous computing environment, heterogeneous and dynamic network environment, node mobility, and limited battery power. The real-time requirements associated with the internet of things and cyber-physical system applications make the problem even more challenging. In this paper, we describe the applications and challenges associated with the design and development of mobile edge cloud system and propose an architecture based on a cross layer design approach for effective decision making.Comment: 4th Annual Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, December 14-16, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.0704

Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Mode Selection and Resource Management for Green Fog Radio Access Networks

Fog radio access networks (F-RANs) are seen as potential architectures to support services of internet of things by leveraging edge caching and edge computing. However, current works studying resource management in F-RANs mainly consider a static system with only one communication mode. Given network dynamics, resource diversity, and the coupling of resource management with mode selection, resource management in F-RANs becomes very challenging. Motivated by the recent development of artificial intelligence, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based joint mode selection and resource management approach is proposed. Each user equipment (UE) can operate either in cloud RAN (C-RAN) mode or in device-to-device mode, and the resource managed includes both radio resource and computing resource. The core idea is that the network controller makes intelligent decisions on UE communication modes and processors' on-off states with precoding for UEs in C-RAN mode optimized subsequently, aiming at minimizing long-term system power consumption under the dynamics of edge cache states. By simulations, the impacts of several parameters, such as learning rate and edge caching service capability, on system performance are demonstrated, and meanwhile the proposal is compared with other different schemes to show its effectiveness. Moreover, transfer learning is integrated with DRL to accelerate learning process.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted to IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Special Issue on AI-Enabled Cognitive Communicatio