1,969 research outputs found
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
Collusion in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions are involved, their effectiveness strongly depends on the perception that users have about the system dependability and trustworthiness. A major threat to the security of these systems is the phenomenon of collusion. Peers can be selfish colluders, when they try to fool the system to gain unfair advantages over other peers, or malicious, when their purpose is to subvert the system or disturb other users. The problem, however, has received so far only a marginal attention by the research community. While several solutions exist to counter attacks in peer-to-peer systems, very few of them are meant to directly counter colluders and their attacks. Reputation, micro-payments, and concepts of game theory are currently used as the main means to obtain fairness in the usage of the resources. Our goal is to provide an overview of the topic by examining the key issues involved. We measure the relevance of the problem in the current literature and the effectiveness of existing philosophies against it, to suggest fruitful directions in the further development of the field
Task Allocation among Connected Devices: Requirements, Approaches and Challenges
Task allocation (TA) is essential when deploying application tasks to systems of connected devices with dissimilar and time-varying characteristics. The challenge of an efficient TA is to assign the tasks to the best devices, according to the context and task requirements. The main purpose of this paper is to study the different connotations of the concept of TA efficiency, and the key factors that most impact on it, so that relevant design guidelines can be defined. The paper first analyzes the domains of connected devices where TA has an important role, which brings to this classification: Internet of Things (IoT), Sensor and Actuator Networks (SAN), Multi-Robot Systems (MRS), Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper then demonstrates that the impact of the key factors on the domains actually affects the design choices of the state-of-the-art TA solutions. It results that resource management has most significantly driven the design of TA algorithms in all domains, especially IoT and SAN. The fulfillment of coverage requirements is important for the definition of TA solutions in MCS and UAV. Quality of Information requirements are mostly included in MCS TA strategies, similar to the design of appropriate incentives. The paper also discusses the issues that need to be addressed by future research activities, i.e.: allowing interoperability of platforms in the implementation of TA functionalities; introducing appropriate trust evaluation algorithms; extending the list of tasks performed by objects; designing TA strategies where network service providers have a role in TA functionalities’ provisioning
Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust
Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to
heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a
non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to
express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure
security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically
obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible
application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust
relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge
infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped
implementation of the methodology
Recent Advances in Cellular D2D Communications
Device-to-device (D2D) communications have attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. It is a promising technique for offloading local traffic from cellular base stations by allowing local devices, in physical proximity, to communicate directly with each other. Furthermore, through relaying, D2D is also a promising approach to enhancing service coverage at cell edges or in black spots. However, there are many challenges to realizing the full benefits of D2D. For one, minimizing the interference between legacy cellular and D2D users operating in underlay mode is still an active research issue. With the 5th generation (5G) communication systems expected to be the main data carrier for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm, the potential role of D2D and its scalability to support massive IoT devices and their machine-centric (as opposed to human-centric) communications need to be investigated. New challenges have also arisen from new enabling technologies for D2D communications, such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and blockchain technologies, which call for new solutions to be proposed. This edited book presents a collection of ten chapters, including one review and nine original research works on addressing many of the aforementioned challenges and beyond
Large-Scale Distributed Coalition Formation
The CyberCraft project is an effort to construct a large scale Distributed Multi-Agent System (DMAS) to provide autonomous Cyberspace defense and mission assurance for the DoD. It employs a small but flexible agent structure that is dynamically reconfigurable to accommodate new tasks and policies. This document describes research into developing protocols and algorithms to ensure continued mission execution in a system of one million or more agents, focusing on protocols for coalition formation and Command and Control. It begins by building large-scale routing algorithms for a Hierarchical Peer to Peer structured overlay network, called Resource-Clustered Chord (RC-Chord). RC-Chord introduces the ability to efficiently locate agents by resources that agents possess. Combined with a task model defined for CyberCraft, this technology feeds into an algorithm that constructs task coalitions in a large-scale DMAS. Experiments reveal the flexibility and effectiveness of these concepts for achieving maximum work throughput in a simulated CyberCraft environment
Shapley Value Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Theory, Method and Its Application to Energy Network
Multi-agent reinforcement learning is an area of rapid advancement in
artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of the important questions to
be answered is how to conduct credit assignment in a multi-agent system. There
have been many schemes designed to conduct credit assignment by multi-agent
reinforcement learning algorithms. Although these credit assignment schemes
have been proved useful in improving the performance of multi-agent
reinforcement learning, most of them are designed heuristically without a
rigorous theoretic basis and therefore infeasible to understand how agents
cooperate. In this thesis, we aim at investigating the foundation of credit
assignment in multi-agent reinforcement learning via cooperative game theory.
We first extend a game model called convex game and a payoff distribution
scheme called Shapley value in cooperative game theory to Markov decision
process, named as Markov convex game and Markov Shapley value respectively. We
represent a global reward game as a Markov convex game under the grand
coalition. As a result, Markov Shapley value can be reasonably used as a credit
assignment scheme in the global reward game. Markov Shapley value possesses the
following virtues: (i) efficiency; (ii) identifiability of dummy agents; (iii)
reflecting the contribution and (iv) symmetry, which form the fair credit
assignment. Based on Markov Shapley value, we propose three multi-agent
reinforcement learning algorithms called SHAQ, SQDDPG and SMFPPO. Furthermore,
we extend Markov convex game to partial observability to deal with the
partially observable problems, named as partially observable Markov convex
game. In application, we evaluate SQDDPG and SMFPPO on the real-world problem
in energy networks.Comment: 206 page
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