Edge analytics in the internet of things

High-data-rate sensors are becoming ubiquitous in the Internet of Things. GigaSight is an Internet-scale repository of crowd-sourced video content that enforces privacy preferences and access controls. The architecture is a federated system of VM-based cloudlets that perform video analytics at the edge of the Internet

Little Boxes: A Dynamic Optimization Approach for Enhanced Cloud Infrastructures

The increasing demand for diverse, mobile applications with various degrees of Quality of Service requirements meets the increasing elasticity of on-demand resource provisioning in virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. This paper provides a dynamic optimization approach for enhanced cloud infrastructures, based on the concept of cloudlets, which are located at hotspot areas throughout a metropolitan area. In conjunction, we consider classical remote data centers that are rigid with respect to QoS but provide nearly abundant computation resources. Given fluctuating user demands, we optimize the cloudlet placement over a finite time horizon from a cloud infrastructure provider's perspective. By the means of a custom tailed heuristic approach, we are able to reduce the computational effort compared to the exact approach by at least three orders of magnitude, while maintaining a high solution quality with a moderate cost increase of 5.8% or less

Efficient Three-stage Auction Schemes for Cloudlets Deployment in Wireless Access Network

Cloudlet deployment and resource allocation for mobile users (MUs) have been extensively studied in existing works for computation resource scarcity. However, most of them failed to jointly consider the two techniques together, and the selfishness of cloudlet and access point (AP) are ignored. Inspired by the group-buying mechanism, this paper proposes three-stage auction schemes by combining cloudlet placement and resource assignment, to improve the social welfare subject to the economic properties. We first divide all MUs into some small groups according to the associated APs. Then the MUs in same group can trade with cloudlets in a group-buying way through the APs. Finally, the MUs pay for the cloudlets if they are the winners in the auction scheme. We prove that our auction schemes can work in polynomial time. We also provide the proofs for economic properties in theory. For the purpose of performance comparison, we compare the proposed schemes with HAF, which is a centralized cloudlet placement scheme without auction. Numerical results confirm the correctness and efficiency of the proposed schemes.Comment: 22 pages,12 figures, Accepted by Wireless Network

Workload allocation in mobile edge computing empowered internet of things

In the past few years, a tremendous number of smart devices and objects, such as smart phones, wearable devices, industrial and utility components, are equipped with sensors to sense the real-time physical information from the environment. Hence, Internet of Things (IoT) is introduced, where various smart devices are connected with each other via the internet and empowered with data analytics. Owing to the high volume and fast velocity of data streams generated by IoT devices, the cloud that can provision flexible and efficient computing resources is employed as a smart brain to process and store the big data generated from IoT devices. However, since the remote cloud is far from IoT users which send application requests and await the results generated by the data processing in the remote cloud, the response time of the requests may be too long, especially unbearable for delay sensitive IoT applications. Therefore, edge computing resources (e.g., cloudlets and fog nodes) which are close to IoT devices and IoT users can be employed to alleviate the traffic load in the core network and minimize the response time for IoT users. In edge computing, the communications latency critically affects the response time of IoT user requests. Owing to the dynamic distribution of IoT users (i.e., UEs), drone base station (DBS), which can be flexibly deployed for hotspot areas, can potentially improve the wireless latency of IoT users by mitigating the heavy traffic loads of macro BSs. Drone-based communications poses two major challenges: 1) the DBS should be deployed in suitable areas with heavy traffic demands to serve more UEs; 2) the traffic loads in the network should be allocated among macro BSs and DBSs to avoid instigating traffic congestions. Therefore, a TrAffic Load baLancing (TALL) scheme in such drone-assisted fog network is proposed to minimize the wireless latency of IoT users. In the scheme, the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems, two algorithms are designed to optimize the DBS placement and user association, respectively. Extensive simulations have been set up to validate the performance of the proposed scheme. Meanwhile, various IoT applications can be run in cloudlets to reduce the response time between IoT users (e.g., user equipments in mobile networks) and cloudlets. Considering the spatial and temporal dynamics of each application\u27s workloads among cloudlets, the workload allocation among cloudlets for each IoT application affects the response time of the application\u27s requests. To solve this problem, an Application awaRE workload Allocation (AREA) scheme for edge computing based IoT is designed to minimize the response time of IoT application requests by determining the destination cloudlets for each IoT user\u27s different types of requests and the amount of computing resources allocated for each application in each cloudlet. In this scheme, both the network delay and computing delay are taken into account, i.e., IoT users\u27 requests are more likely assigned to closer and lightly loaded cloudlets. The performance of the proposed scheme has been validated by extensive simulations. In addition, the latency of data flows in IoT devices consist of both the communications latency and computing latency. When some BSs and fog nodes are lightly loaded, other overloaded BSs and fog nodes may incur congestion. Thus, a workload balancing scheme in a fog network is proposed to minimize the latency of IoT data in the communications and processing procedures by associating IoT devices to suitable BSs. Furthermore, the convergence and the optimality of the proposed workload balancing scheme has been proved. Through extensive simulations, the performance of the proposed load balancing scheme is validated

A Case Study of Edge Computing Implementations: Multi-access Edge Computing, Fog Computing and Cloudlet

With the explosive growth of intelligent and mobile devices, the current centralized cloud computing paradigm is encountering difficult challenges. Since the primary requirements have shifted towards implementing real-time response and supporting context awareness and mobility, there is an urgent need to bring resources and functions of centralized clouds to the edge of networks, which has led to the emergence of the edge computing paradigm. Edge computing increases the responsibilities of network edges by hosting computation and services, therefore enhancing performances and improving quality of experience (QoE). Fog computing, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and cloudlet are three typical and promising implementations of edge computing. Fog computing aims to build a system that enables cloud-to-thing service connectivity and works in concert with clouds, MEC is seen as a key technology of the fifth generation (5G) system, and Cloudlet is a micro-data center deployed in close proximity. In terms of deployment scenarios, Fog computing focuses on the Internet of Things (IoT), MEC mainly provides mobile RAN application solutions for 5G systems, and cloudlet offloads computing power at the network edge. In this paper, we present a comprehensive case study on these three edge computing implementations, including their architectures, differences, and their respective application scenario in IoT, 5G wireless systems, and smart edge. We discuss the requirements, benefits, and mechanisms of typical co-deployment cases for each paradigm and identify challenges and future directions in edge computing

Cloudlet computing : recent advances, taxonomy, and challenges

A cloudlet is an emerging computing paradigm that is designed to meet the requirements and expectations of the Internet of things (IoT) and tackle the conventional limitations of a cloud (e.g., high latency). The idea is to bring computing resources (i.e., storage and processing) to the edge of a network. This article presents a taxonomy of cloudlet applications, outlines cloudlet utilities, and describes recent advances, challenges, and future research directions. Based on the literature, a unique taxonomy of cloudlet applications is designed. Moreover, a cloudlet computation offloading application for augmenting resource-constrained IoT devices, handling compute-intensive tasks, and minimizing the energy consumption of related devices is explored. This study also highlights the viability of cloudlets to support smart systems and applications, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and applications that require high-quality service. Finally, the role of cloudlets in emergency situations, hostile conditions, and in the technological integration of future applications and services is elaborated in detail. © 2013 IEEE