Embedding Games

Large scale distributed computing infrastructures pose challenging resource management problems, which could be addressed by adopting one of two perspectives. On the one hand, the problem could be framed as a global optimization that aims to minimize some notion of system-wide (social) cost. On the other hand, the problem could be framed in a game-theoretic setting whereby rational, selfish users compete for a share of the resources so as to maximize their private utilities with little or no regard for system-wide objectives. This game-theoretic setting is particularly applicable to emerging cloud and grid environments, testbed platforms, and many networking applications. By adopting the first, global optimization perspective, this thesis presents NetEmbed: a framework, associated mechanisms, and implementations that enable the mapping of requested configurations to available infrastructure resources. By adopting the second, game-theoretic perspective, this thesis defines and establishes the premises of two resource acquisition mechanisms: Colocation Games and Trade and Cap. Colocation Games enable the modeling and analysis of the dynamics that result when rational, selfish parties interact in an attempt to minimize the individual costs they incur to secure shared resources necessary to support their application QoS or SLA requirements. Trade and Cap is a market-based scheduling and load-balancing mechanism that facilitates the trading of resources when users have a mixture of rigid and fluid jobs, and incentivizes users to behave in ways that result in better load-balancing of shared resources. In addition to developing their analytical underpinnings, this thesis establishes the viability of NetEmbed, Colocation Games, and Trade and Cap by presenting implementation blueprints and experimental results for many variants of these mechanisms. The results presented in this thesis pave the way for the development of economically-sound resource acquisition and management solutions in two emerging, and increasingly important settings. In pay-as-you-go settings, where pricing is based on usage, this thesis anticipates new service offerings that enable efficient marketplaces in the presence of non-cooperative, selfish agents. In settings where pricing is not a function of usage, this thesis anticipates the development of service offerings that enable trading of usage rights to maximize the utility of a shared infrastructure to its tenants

Low-latency Networking: Where Latency Lurks and How to Tame It

While the current generation of mobile and fixed communication networks has been standardized for mobile broadband services, the next generation is driven by the vision of the Internet of Things and mission critical communication services requiring latency in the order of milliseconds or sub-milliseconds. However, these new stringent requirements have a large technical impact on the design of all layers of the communication protocol stack. The cross layer interactions are complex due to the multiple design principles and technologies that contribute to the layers' design and fundamental performance limitations. We will be able to develop low-latency networks only if we address the problem of these complex interactions from the new point of view of sub-milliseconds latency. In this article, we propose a holistic analysis and classification of the main design principles and enabling technologies that will make it possible to deploy low-latency wireless communication networks. We argue that these design principles and enabling technologies must be carefully orchestrated to meet the stringent requirements and to manage the inherent trade-offs between low latency and traditional performance metrics. We also review currently ongoing standardization activities in prominent standards associations, and discuss open problems for future research

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Resource Allocation Mechanisms in Edge and Fog Computing

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-centric application management raises questions related to quality of service for real-time applications. Fog and edge computing (FEC) provide a complement to the cloud by filling the gap between cloud and IoT. Resource management on multiple resources from distributed and administrative FEC nodes is a key challenge to ensure the quality of end-user’s experience. To improve resource utilisation and system performance, researchers have been proposed many fair allocation mechanisms for resource management. Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF), a resource allocation policy for multiple resource types, meets most of the required fair allocation characteristics. However, DRF is suitable for centralised resource allocation without considering the effects (or feedbacks) of large-scale distributed environments like multi-controller software defined networking (SDN). Nash bargaining from micro-economic theory or competitive equilibrium equal incomes (CEEI) are well suited to solving dynamic optimisation problems proposing to ‘proportionately’ share resources among distributed participants. Although CEEI’s decentralised policy guarantees load balancing for performance isolation, they are not faultproof for computation offloading. The thesis aims to propose a hybrid and fair allocation mechanism for rejuvenation of decentralised SDN controller deployment. We apply multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with robustness against adversarial controllers to enable efficient priority scheduling for FEC. Motivated by software cybernetics and homeostasis, weighted DRF is generalised by applying the principles of feedback (positive or/and negative network effects) in reverse game theory (GT) to design hybrid scheduling schemes for joint multi-resource and multitask offloading/forwarding in FEC environments. In the first piece of study, monotonic scheduling for joint offloading at the federated edge is addressed by proposing truthful mechanism (algorithmic) to neutralise harmful negative and positive distributive bargain externalities respectively. The IP-DRF scheme is a MARL approach applying partition form game (PFG) to guarantee second-best Pareto optimality viii | P a g e (SBPO) in allocation of multi-resources from deterministic policy in both population and resource non-monotonicity settings. In the second study, we propose DFog-DRF scheme to address truthful fog scheduling with bottleneck fairness in fault-probable wireless hierarchical networks by applying constrained coalition formation (CCF) games to implement MARL. The multi-objective optimisation problem for fog throughput maximisation is solved via a constraint dimensionality reduction methodology using fairness constraints for efficient gateway and low-level controller’s placement. For evaluation, we develop an agent-based framework to implement fair allocation policies in distributed data centre environments. In empirical results, the deterministic policy of IP-DRF scheme provides SBPO and reduces the average execution and turnaround time by 19% and 11.52% as compared to the Nash bargaining or CEEI deterministic policy for 57,445 cloudlets in population non-monotonic settings. The processing cost of tasks shows significant improvement (6.89% and 9.03% for fixed and variable pricing) for the resource non-monotonic setting - using 38,000 cloudlets. The DFog-DRF scheme when benchmarked against asset fair (MIP) policy shows superior performance (less than 1% in time complexity) for up to 30 FEC nodes. Furthermore, empirical results using 210 mobiles and 420 applications prove the efficacy of our hybrid scheduling scheme for hierarchical clustering considering latency and network usage for throughput maximisation.Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi (Tetfund, Nigeria

Game-Theoretic Foundations for Forming Trusted Coalitions of Multi-Cloud Services in the Presence of Active and Passive Attacks

The prominence of cloud computing as a common paradigm for offering Web-based services has led to an unprecedented proliferation in the number of services that are deployed in cloud data centers. In parallel, services' communities and cloud federations have gained an increasing interest in the recent past years due to their ability to facilitate the discovery, composition, and resource scaling issues in large-scale services' markets. The problem is that the existing community and federation formation solutions deal with services as traditional software systems and overlook the fact that these services are often being offered as part of the cloud computing technology, which poses additional challenges at the architectural, business, and security levels. The motivation of this thesis stems from four main observations/research gaps that we have drawn through our literature reviews and/or experiments, which are: (1) leading cloud services such as Google and Amazon do not have incentives to group themselves into communities/federations using the existing community/federation formation solutions; (2) it is quite difficult to find a central entity that can manage the community/federation formation process in a multi-cloud environment; (3) if we allow services to rationally select their communities/federations without considering their trust relationships, these services might have incentives to structure themselves into communities/federations consisting of a large number of malicious services; and (4) the existing intrusion detection solutions in the domain of cloud computing are still ineffective in capturing advanced multi-type distributed attacks initiated by communities/federations of attackers since they overlook the attacker's strategies in their design and ignore the cloud system's resource constraints. This thesis aims to address these gaps by (1) proposing a business-oriented community formation model that accounts for the business potential of the services in the formation process to motivate the participation of services of all business capabilities, (2) introducing an inter-cloud trust framework that allows services deployed in one or disparate cloud centers to build credible trust relationships toward each other, while overcoming the collusion attacks that occur to mislead trust results even in extreme cases wherein attackers form the majority, (3) designing a trust-based game theoretical model that enables services to distributively form trustworthy multi-cloud communities wherein the number of malicious services is minimal, (4) proposing an intra-cloud trust framework that allows the cloud system to build credible trust relationships toward the guest Virtual Machines (VMs) running cloud-based services using objective and subjective trust sources, (5) designing and solving a trust-based maxmin game theoretical model that allows the cloud system to optimally distribute the detection load among VMs within a limited budget of resources, while considering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks as a practical scenario, and (6) putting forward a resource-aware comprehensive detection and prevention system that is able to capture and prevent advanced simultaneous multi-type attacks within a limited amount of resources. We conclude the thesis by uncovering some persisting research gaps that need further study and investigation in the future

Multi-Dimensional Resource Orchestration in Vehicular Edge Networks

In the era of autonomous vehicles, the advanced technologies of connected vehicle lead to the development of driving-related applications to meet the stringent safety requirements and the infotainment applications to improve passenger experience. Newly developed vehicular applications require high-volume data transmission, accurate sensing data collection, and reliable interaction, imposing substantial constrains on vehicular networks that solely rely on cellular networks to fetch data from the Internet and on-board processors to make driving decisions. To enhance multifarious vehicular applications, Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HVNets) have been proposed, in which edge nodes, including base stations and roadside units, can provide network connections, resulting in significantly reduced vehicular communication cost. In addition, caching servers are equipped at the edge nodes, to further alleviate the communication load for backhaul links and reduce data downloading delay. Hence, we aim to orchestrate the multi-dimensional resources, including communication, caching, and sensing resources, in the complex and dynamic vehicular environment to enhance vehicular edge network performance. The main technical issues are: 1) to accommodate the delivery services for both location-based and popular contents, the scheme of caching contents at edge servers should be devised, considering the cooperation of caching servers at different edge nodes, the mobility of vehicles, and the differential requirements of content downloading services; 2) to support the safety message exchange and collective perception services for vehicles, communication and sensing resources are jointly allocated, the decisions of which are coupled due to the resource sharing among different services and neighboring vehicles; and 3) for interaction-intensive service provisioning, e.g., trajectory design, the forwarding resources in core networks are allocated to achieve delay-sensitive packet transmissions between vehicles and management controllers, ensuring the high-quality interactivity. In this thesis, we design the multi-dimensional resource orchestration schemes in the edge assisted HVNets to address the three technical issues. Firstly, we design a cooperative edge caching scheme to support various vehicular content downloading services, which allows vehicles to fetch one content from multiple caching servers cooperatively. In particular, we consider two types of vehicular content requests, i.e., location-based and popular contents, with different delay requirements. Both types of contents are encoded according to fountain code and cooperatively cached at multiple servers. The proposed scheme can be optimized by finding an optimal cooperative content placement that determines the placing locations and proportions for all contents. To this end, we analyze the upper bound proportion of content caching at a single server and provide the respective theoretical analysis of transmission delay and service cost (including content caching and transmission cost) for both types of contents. We then formulate an optimization problem of cooperative content placement to minimize the overall transmission delay and service cost. As the problem is a multi-objective multi-dimensional multi-choice knapsack one, which is proved to be NP-hard, we devise an ant colony optimization-based scheme to solve the problem and achieve a near-optimal solution. Simulation results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed scheme, including its convergence and optimality of caching, while guaranteeing low transmission delay and service cost. Secondly, to support the vehicular safety message transmissions, we propose a two-level adaptive resource allocation (TARA) framework. In particular, three types of safety message are considered in urban vehicular networks, i.e., the event-triggered message for urgent condition warning, the periodic message for vehicular status notification, and the message for environmental perception. Roadside units are deployed for network management, and thus messages can be transmitted through either vehicle-to-infrastructure or vehicle-to-vehicle connections. To satisfy the requirements of different message transmissions, the proposed TARA framework consists of a group-level resource reservation module and a vehicle-level resource allocation module. Particularly, the resource reservation module is designed to allocate resources to support different types of message transmission for each vehicle group at the first level, and the group is formed by a set of neighboring vehicles. To learn the implicit relation between the resource demand and message transmission requests, a supervised learning model is devised in the resource reservation module, where to obtain the training data we further propose a sequential resource allocation (SRA) scheme. Based on historical network information, the SRA scheme offline optimizes the allocation of sensing resources (i.e., choosing vehicles to provide perception data) and communication resources. With the resource reservation result for each group, the vehicle-level resource allocation module is then devised to distribute specific resources for each vehicle to satisfy the differential requirements in real time. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TARA framework in terms of the high successful reception ratio and low latency for message transmissions, and the high quality of collective environmental perception. Thirdly, we investigate forwarding resource sharing scheme to support interaction intensive services in HVNets, especially for the delay-sensitive packet transmission between vehicles and management controllers. A learning-based proactive resource sharing scheme is proposed for core communication networks, where the available forwarding resources at a switch are proactively allocated to the traffic flows in order to maximize the efficiency of resource utilization with delay satisfaction. The resource sharing scheme consists of two joint modules: estimation of resource demands and allocation of available resources. For service provisioning, resource demand of each traffic flow is estimated based on the predicted packet arrival rate. Considering the distinct features of each traffic flow, a linear regression scheme is developed for resource demand estimation, utilizing the mapping relation between traffic flow status and required resources, upon which a network switch makes decision on allocating available resources for delay satisfaction and efficient resource utilization. To learn the implicit relation between the allocated resources and delay, a multi-armed bandit learning-based resource sharing scheme is proposed, which enables fast resource sharing adjustment to traffic arrival dynamics. The proposed scheme is proved to be asymptotically approaching the optimal strategy, with polynomial time complexity. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed resource sharing scheme in terms of delay satisfaction, traffic adaptiveness, and resource sharing gain. In summary, we have investigated the cooperative caching placement for content downloading services, joint communication and sensing resource allocation for safety message transmissions, and forwarding resource sharing scheme in core networks for interaction intensive services. The schemes developed in the thesis should provide practical and efficient solutions to manage the multi-dimensional resources in vehicular networks

Network Game Theory Models of Services and Quality Competition with Applications to Future Internet Architectures and Supply Chains

The Internet has transformed the way in which we conduct business and perform economic and financial transactions. One key challenge of the Internet is the inefficiency of the mechanisms by which technology is deployed and the business and economic models surrounding these processes (Wolf et al. (2014)). Equilibrium models for the Internet generally assume basic economic relationships. However, in new paradigms for the Internet and in supply chain networks, price is not the only factor; quality of service (QoS) is also of increasing importance. Supply chains networks, which give us the means to manufacture products and deliver them to points of demand across the globe, are also under many pressures to offer differentiated products and services (Nagurney (2014)). It is well-known today that success is determined by how well the entire supply chain performs, rather than the performance of its individual entities. This dissertation contributes to the analysis, design, and management of the future Internet and supply chain networks with a focus on price and quality competition in service-oriented networks. Specifically, I focus on economic models for the Internet of the future by developing both a basic and a general network economic game theory model of a quality-based service-oriented Internet to study competition among service providers. To study and analyze the underlying dynamics of the various economic decision-makers, subsequently, I develop a dynamic network economic model of a service-oriented Internet with price and quality competition using projected dynamical systems theory. Then, to assess the prices for various contract durations at the demand markets, I consider a game theory model of a service-oriented Internet in which the network providers compete in usage service rates, quality levels, and duration-based contracts. Finally, I construct a model that captures the competition among manufacturers and freight service providers in a supply chain network. This model is the first one in the literature that handles both price and quality competition with multiple modes of shipment from both equilibrium and dynamic perspectives. For each model, I derive the governing equilibrium conditions and provide the equivalent variational inequality formulations. In order to illustrate the modeling framework and the algorithm, I present computed solutions to several numerical examples for each model as well as sensitivity analysis results. This dissertation is heavily based on the following papers: Saberi, Nagurney, and Wolf (2014), Nagurney et al. (2014a), Nagurney et al. (2015b), and Nagurney et al. (2015a) as well as additional results and conclusions

Efficient Resource Management for Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing has recently gained popularity as a cost-effective model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud provider packages its physical resources in data centers into virtual resources and offers them to service providers using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Meanwhile, a service provider uses the rented virtual resources to host its services. This large-scale multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing systems raises key challenges regarding how data centers resources should be controlled and managed by both service and cloud providers. This thesis addresses several key challenges pertaining to resource management in cloud environments. From the perspective of service providers, we address the problem of selecting appropriate data centers for service hosting with consideration of resource price, service quality as well as dynamic reconfiguration costs. From the perspective of cloud providers, as it has been reported that workload in real data centers can be typically divided into server-based applications and MapReduce applications with different performance and scheduling criteria, we provide separate resource management solutions for each type of workloads. For server-based applications, we provide a dynamic capacity provisioning scheme that dynamically adjusts the number of active servers to achieve the best trade-off between energy savings and scheduling delay, while considering heterogeneous resource characteristics of both workload and physical machines. For MapReduce applications, we first analyzed task run-time resource consumption of a large variety of MapReduce jobs and discovered it can vary significantly over-time, depending on the phase the task is currently executing. We then present a novel scheduling algorithm that controls task execution at the level of phases with the aim of improving both job running time and resource utilization. Through detailed simulations and experiments using real cloud clusters, we have found our proposed solutions achieve substantial gain compared to current state-of-art resource management solutions, and therefore have strong implications in the design of real cloud resource management systems in practice

Efficient Resource Management for Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing has recently gained popularity as a cost-effective model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud provider packages its physical resources in data centers into virtual resources and offers them to service providers using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Meanwhile, a service provider uses the rented virtual resources to host its services. This large-scale multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing systems raises key challenges regarding how data centers resources should be controlled and managed by both service and cloud providers. This thesis addresses several key challenges pertaining to resource management in cloud environments. From the perspective of service providers, we address the problem of selecting appropriate data centers for service hosting with consideration of resource price, service quality as well as dynamic reconfiguration costs. From the perspective of cloud providers, as it has been reported that workload in real data centers can be typically divided into server-based applications and MapReduce applications with different performance and scheduling criteria, we provide separate resource management solutions for each type of workloads. For server-based applications, we provide a dynamic capacity provisioning scheme that dynamically adjusts the number of active servers to achieve the best trade-off between energy savings and scheduling delay, while considering heterogeneous resource characteristics of both workload and physical machines. For MapReduce applications, we first analyzed task run-time resource consumption of a large variety of MapReduce jobs and discovered it can vary significantly over-time, depending on the phase the task is currently executing. We then present a novel scheduling algorithm that controls task execution at the level of phases with the aim of improving both job running time and resource utilization. Through detailed simulations and experiments using real cloud clusters, we have found our proposed solutions achieve substantial gain compared to current state-of-art resource management solutions, and therefore have strong implications in the design of real cloud resource management systems in practice