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

CogCell: Cognitive Interplay between 60GHz Picocells and 2.4/5GHz Hotspots in the 5G Era

Rapid proliferation of wireless communication devices and the emergence of a variety of new applications have triggered investigations into next-generation mobile broadband systems, i.e., 5G. Legacy 2G--4G systems covering large areas were envisioned to serve both indoor and outdoor environments. However, in the 5G-era, 80\% of overall traffic is expected to be generated in indoors. Hence, the current approach of macro-cell mobile network, where there is no differentiation between indoors and outdoors, needs to be reconsidered. We envision 60\,GHz mmWave picocell architecture to support high-speed indoor and hotspot communications. We envisage the 5G indoor network as a combination of-, and interplay between, 2.4/5\,GHz having robust coverage and 60\,GHz links offering high datarate. This requires an intelligent coordination and cooperation. We propose 60\,GHz picocellular network architecture, called CogCell, leveraging the ubiquitous WiFi. We propose to use 60\,GHz for the data plane and 2.4/5GHz for the control plane. The hybrid network architecture considers an opportunistic fall-back to 2.4/5\,GHz in case of poor connectivity in the 60\,GHz domain. Further, to avoid the frequent re-beamforming in 60\,GHz directional links due to mobility, we propose a cognitive module -- a sensor-assisted intelligent beam switching procedure -- which reduces the communication overhead. We believe that the CogCell concept will help future indoor communications and possibly outdoor hotspots, where mobile stations and access points collaborate with each other to improve the user experience.Comment: 14 PAGES in IEEE Communications Magazine, Special issue on Emerging Applications, Services and Engineering for Cognitive Cellular Systems (EASE4CCS), July 201

60 GHz MAC Standardization: Progress and Way Forward

Communication at mmWave frequencies has been the focus in the recent years. In this paper, we discuss standardization efforts in 60 GHz short range communication and the progress therein. We compare the available standards in terms of network architecture, medium access control mechanisms, physical layer techniques and several other features. Comparative analysis indicates that IEEE 802.11ad is likely to lead the short-range indoor communication at 60 GHz. We bring to the fore resolved and unresolved issues pertaining to robust WLAN connectivity at 60 GHz. Further, we discuss the role of mmWave bands in 5G communication scenarios and highlight the further efforts required in terms of research and standardization

Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

Architecture and Implementation of a Trust Model for Pervasive Applications

Collaborative effort to share resources is a significant feature of pervasive computing environments. To achieve secure service discovery and sharing, and to distinguish between malevolent and benevolent entities, trust models must be defined. It is critical to estimate a device\u27s initial trust value because of the transient nature of pervasive smart space; however, most of the prior research work on trust models for pervasive applications used the notion of constant initial trust assignment. In this paper, we design and implement a trust model called DIRT. We categorize services in different security levels and depending on the service requester\u27s context information, we calculate the initial trust value. Our trust value is assigned for each device and for each service. Our overall trust estimation for a service depends on the recommendations of the neighbouring devices, inference from other service-trust values for that device, and direct trust experience. We provide an extensive survey of related work, and we demonstrate the distinguishing features of our proposed model with respect to the existing models. We implement a healthcare-monitoring application and a location-based service prototype over DIRT. We also provide a performance analysis of the model with respect to some of its important characteristics tested in various scenarios

Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks

The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs, eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin

Mobile Computing in Digital Ecosystems: Design Issues and Challenges

In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an ecosystem constructed out of so-called digital organisms (see below), that can foster the development of novel distributed services. In this context, a human user equipped with his/her own mobile devices, can be though of as a digital organism (DO), a subsystem characterized by a set of peculiar features and resources it can offer to the rest of the ecosystem for use from its peer DOs. The internal organization of the DO must address issues of management of its own resources, including power consumption. Inside the DO and among DOs, peer-to-peer interaction mechanisms can be conveniently deployed to favor resource sharing and data dissemination. Throughout this paper, we show that most of the solutions and technologies needed to construct a digital ecosystem are already available. What is still missing is a framework (i.e., mechanisms, protocols, services) that can support effectively the integration and cooperation of these technologies. In addition, in the following we show that that framework can be implemented as a middleware subsystem that enables novel and ubiquitous forms of computation and communication. Finally, in order to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce some experimental results we have obtained from preliminary implementations of (parts of) that subsystem.Comment: Proceedings of the 7th International wireless Communications and Mobile Computing conference (IWCMC-2011), Emergency Management: Communication and Computing Platforms Worksho