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

Cooperative announcement-based caching for video-on-demand streaming

Recently, video-on-demand (VoD) streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have gained a lot of popularity. This has led to a strong increase in bandwidth capacity requirements in the network. To reduce this network load, the design of appropriate caching strategies is of utmost importance. Based on the fact that, typically, a video stream is temporally segmented into smaller chunks that can be accessed and decoded independently, cache replacement strategies have been developed that take advantage of this temporal structure in the video. In this paper, two caching strategies are proposed that additionally take advantage of the phenomenon of binge watching, where users stream multiple consecutive episodes of the same series, reported by recent user behavior studies to become the everyday behavior. Taking into account this information allows us to predict future segment requests, even before the video playout has started. Two strategies are proposed, both with a different level of coordination between the caches in the network. Using a VoD request trace based on binge watching user characteristics, the presented algorithms have been thoroughly evaluated in multiple network topologies with different characteristics, showing their general applicability. It was shown that in a realistic scenario, the proposed election-based caching strategy can outperform the state-of-the-art by 20% in terms of cache hit ratio while using 4% less network bandwidth

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Modeling and Evaluation of Multisource Streaming Strategies in P2P VoD Systems

In recent years, multimedia content distribution has largely been moved to the Internet, inducing broadcasters, operators and service providers to upgrade with large expenses their infrastructures. In this context, streaming solutions that rely on user devices such as set-top boxes (STBs) to offload dedicated streaming servers are particularly appropriate. In these systems, contents are usually replicated and scattered over the network established by STBs placed at users' home, and the video-on-demand (VoD) service is provisioned through streaming sessions established among neighboring STBs following a Peer-to-Peer fashion. Up to now the majority of research works have focused on the design and optimization of content replicas mechanisms to minimize server costs. The optimization of replicas mechanisms has been typically performed either considering very crude system performance indicators or analyzing asymptotic behavior. In this work, instead, we propose an analytical model that complements previous works providing fairly accurate predictions of system performance (i.e., blocking probability). Our model turns out to be a highly scalable, flexible, and extensible tool that may be helpful both for designers and developers to efficiently predict the effect of system design choices in large scale STB-VoD system