Research on Efficiency and Security for Emerging Distributed Applications

Distributed computing has never stopped its advancement since the early years of computer systems. In recent years, edge computing has emerged as an extension of cloud computing. The main idea of edge computing is to provide hardware resources in proximity to the end devices, thereby offering low network latency and high network bandwidth. However, as an emerging distributed computing paradigm, edge computing currently lacks effective system support. To this end, this dissertation studies the ways of building system support for edge computing. We first study how to support the existing, non-edge-computing applications in edge computing environments. This research leads to the design of a platform called SMOC that supports executing mobile applications on edge servers. We consider mobile applications in this project because there are a great number of mobile applications in the market and we believe that mobile-edge computing will become an important edge computing paradigm in the future. SMOC supports executing ARM-based mobile applications on x86 edge servers by establishing a running environment identical to that of the mobile device at the edge. It also exploits hardware virtualization on the mobile device to protect user input. Next, we investigate how to facilitate the development of edge applications with system support. This study leads to the design of an edge computing framework called EdgeEngine, which consists of a middleware running on top of the edge computing infrastructure and a powerful, concise programming interface. Developers can implement edge applications with minimal programming effort through the programming interface, and the middleware automatically fulfills the routine tasks, such as data dispatching, task scheduling, lock management, etc., in a highly efficient way. Finally, we envision that consensus will be an important building block for many edge applications, because we consider the consensus problem to be the most important fundamental problem in distributed computing while edge computing is an emerging distributed computing paradigm. Therefore, we investigate how to support the edge applications that rely on consensus, helping them achieve good performance. This study leads to the design of a novel, Paxos-based consensus protocol called Nomad, which rapidly orders the messages received by the edge. Nomad can quickly adapt to the workload changes across the edge computing system, and it incorporates a backend cloud to resolve the conflicts in a timely manner. By doing so, Nomad reduces the user-perceived latency as much as possible, outperforming the existing consensus protocols

MobiPADS: a reflective middleware for context-aware mobile computing

distributed computing services that essentially abstract the underlying network services to a monolithic “black box. ” In a mobile operating environment, the fundamental assumption of middleware abstracting a unified distributed service for all types of applications operating over a static network infrastructure is no longer valid. In particular, mobile applications are not able to leverage the benefits of adaptive computing to optimize its computation based on current contextual situations. In this paper, we introduce the Mobile Platform for Actively Deployable Service (MobiPADS) system. MobiPADS is designed to support context-aware processing by providing an executing platform to enable active service deployment and reconfiguration of the service composition in response to environments of varying contexts. Unlike most mobile middleware, MobiPADS supports dynamic adaptation at both the middleware and application layers to provide flexible configuration of resources to optimize the operations of mobile applications. Within the MobiPADS system, services (known as mobilets) are configured as chained service objects to provide augmented services to the underlying mobile applications so as to alleviate the adverse conditions of a wireless environment. Index Terms—Middleware, mobile applications, mobile computing support services, mobile environments.

Social Welfare Maximization Auction in Edge Computing Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain

Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider

JXTA-Overlay: a P2P platform for distributed, collaborative, and ubiquitous computing

With the fast growth of the Internet infrastructure and the use of large-scale complex applications in industries, transport, logistics, government, health, and businesses, there is an increasing need to design and deploy multifeatured networking applications. Important features of such applications include the capability to be self-organized, be decentralized, integrate different types of resources (personal computers, laptops, and mobile and sensor devices), and provide global, transparent, and secure access to resources. Moreover, such applications should support not only traditional forms of reliable distributing computing and optimization of resources but also various forms of collaborative activities, such as business, online learning, and social networks in an intelligent and secure environment. In this paper, we present the Juxtapose (JXTA)-Overlay, which is a JXTA-based peer-to-peer (P2P) platform designed with the aim to leverage capabilities of Java, JXTA, and P2P technologies to support distributed and collaborative systems. The platform can be used not only for efficient and reliable distributed computing but also for collaborative activities and ubiquitous computing by integrating in the platform end devices. The design of a user interface as well as security issues are also tackled. We evaluate the proposed system by experimental study and show its usefulness for massive processing computations and e-learning applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

VirtFogSim: A parallel toolbox for dynamic energy-delay performance testing and optimization of 5G Mobile-Fog-Cloud virtualized platforms

It is expected that the pervasive deployment of multi-tier 5G-supported Mobile-Fog-Cloudtechnological computing platforms will constitute an effective means to support the real-time execution of future Internet applications by resource- and energy-limited mobile devices. Increasing interest in this emerging networking-computing technology demands the optimization and performance evaluation of several parts of the underlying infrastructures. However, field trials are challenging due to their operational costs, and in every case, the obtained results could be difficult to repeat and customize. These emergingMobile-Fog-Cloud ecosystems still lack, indeed, customizable software tools for the performance simulation of their computing-networking building blocks. Motivated by these considerations, in this contribution, we present VirtFogSim. It is aMATLAB-supported software toolbox that allows the dynamic joint optimization and tracking of the energy and delay performance of Mobile-Fog-Cloud systems for the execution of applications described by general Directed Application Graphs (DAGs). In a nutshell, the main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times, (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering, and (v) itsMATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms. To check both the actual optimization and scalability capabilities of the VirtFogSim toolbox, a number of experimental setups featuring different use cases and operational environments are simulated, and their performances are compared

eXCloud: Transparent runtime support for scaling mobile applications in cloud

Cloud computing augments applications with ease-of-access to the enormous resources on the Internet. Combined with mobile computing technologies, mobile applications can exploit the Cloud everywhere by statically distributing code segments or dynamically migrating running processes onto cloud services. Existing migration techniques are however too coarse-grained for mobile devices, so the overheads often offset the benefits of migration. To build a truly elastic mobile cloud computing infrastructure, we introduce eXCloud (eXtensible Cloud) - a middleware system with multi-level mobility support, ranging from as coarse as a VM instance to as fine as a runtime stack frame, and allows resources to be integrated and used dynamically. In eXCloud, a stack-on-demand (SOD) approach is used to support computation mobility throughout the mobile cloud environment. The approach is fully adaptive, goal-driven and transparent. By downward task migration, applications running on the cloud nodes can exploit or take control of special resources in mobile devices such as GPS and cameras. With a restorable MPI layer, task migrations of MPI parallel programs can happen between cloud nodes or be initiated from a mobile device. Our evaluation shows that SOD outperforms several existing migration mechanisms in terms of migration overhead and latency. All our techniques result in better resource utilization through task migrations among cloud nodes and mobile nodes.published_or_final_versionThe 2011 International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC), Hong Kong, China, 12-14 December 2011. In Proceedings of CSC, 2011, p. 103-11