Fog computing is an emerging paradigm that aims to meet the increasing computation demands arising from the billions of devices connected to the Internet. Offloading services of an application from the Cloud to the edge of the network can improve the overall Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the application since it can process data closer to user devices. Diverse Fog nodes ranging from Wi-Fi routers to mini-clouds with varying resource capabilities makes it challenging to determine which services of an application need to be offloaded. In this paper, a context-aware mechanism for distributing applications across the Cloud and the Fog is proposed. The mechanism dynamically generates (re)deployment plans for the application to maximise the performance efficiency of the application by taking the QoS and running costs into account. The mechanism relies on deep Q-networks to generate a distribution plan without prior knowledge of the available resources on the Fog node, the network condition and the application. The feasibility of the proposed context-aware distribution mechanism is demonstrated on two use-cases, namely a face detection application and a location-based mobile game. The benefits are increased utility of dynamic distribution in both use cases, when compared to a static distribution approach used in existing research.
The powerful paradigm of Fog computing is currently receiving major interest, as it provides the possibility to integrate virtualized servers into networks and brings cloud service closer to end devices. To support this distributed intelligent platform, Software-Defined Network (SDN) has emerged as a viable network technology in the Fog computing environment. However, uncertainties related to task demands and the different computing capacities of Fog nodes, inquire an effective load balancing algorithm. In this paper, the load balancing problem has been addressed under the constraint of achiev…
Fog computing emerged as a crucial platform for the deployment of IoT applications. The complexity of such applications requires methods that handle the resource diversity and network structure of Fog devices while maximizing the service placement and reducing resource wastage. Prior studies in this domain primarily focused on optimizing specific application requirements and fail to address the network topology combined with the different types of resources encountered in Fog devices. To overcome these problems, we propose a multilayer resource-aware partitioning method to minimize the resourc…
Fog computing is a promising computing paradigm for time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It helps to process data close to the users, in order to deliver faster processing outcomes than the Cloud; it also helps to reduce network traffic. The computation environment in the Fog computing is highly dynamic and most of the Fog devices are battery powered hence the chances of application failure is high which leads to delaying the application outcome. On the other hand, if we rerun the application in other devices after the failure it will not comply with time-sensitiveness. To sol…
Fog computing is a promising computing paradigm in which IoT data can be processed near the edge to support time-sensitive applications. However, the availability of the resources in the computation device is not stable since they may not be exclusively dedicated to the processing in the Fog environment. This, combined with dynamic user behaviour, can affect the execution of applications. To address dynamic changes in user behaviour in a resource limited Fog device, this paper proposes a Multi-Criteria-based resource allocation policy with resource reservation in order to minimise overall dela…
Despite constant improvements in efficiency, today's data centers and networks consume enormous amounts of energy and this demand is expected to rise even further. An important research question is whether and how fog computing can curb this trend. As real-life deployments of fog infrastructure are still rare, a significant part of research relies on simulations. However, existing power models usually only target particular components such as compute nodes or battery-constrained edge devices. Combining analytical and discrete-event modeling, we develop a holistic but granular energy consumptio…
Smart farming is a recent innovation in the agriculture sector that can improve the agricultural yield by using smarter, automated, and data driven farm processes that interact with IoT devices deployed on farms. A cloud-fog infrastructure provides an effective platform to execute IoT applications. While fog computing satisfies the real-time processing need of delay-sensitive IoT services by bringing virtualized services closer to the IoT devices, cloud computing allows execution of applications with higher computational requirements. The deployment of IoT applications is a critical challenge …
This paper studies the potential performance improvement that can be achieved by enabling multi-operator wireless connectivity for cloud/fog computing-connected vehicular systems. Mobile network operator (MNO) selection and switching problem is formulated by jointly considering switching cost, quality-of-service (QoS) variations between MNOs, and the different prices that can be charged by different MNOs as well as cloud and fog servers. A double deep Q network (DQN) based switching policy is proposed and proved to be able to minimize the long-term average cost of each vehicle with guaranteed …
Fog computing promises to enable machine learning tasks to scale to large amounts of data by distributing processing across connected devices. Two key challenges to achieving this goal are heterogeneity in devices compute resources and topology constraints on which devices can communicate with each other. We address these challenges by developing the first network-aware distributed learning optimization methodology where devices optimally share local data processing and send their learnt parameters to a server for aggregation at certain time intervals. Unlike traditional federated learning fra…
Stateful applications and virtualized network functions (VNFs) can benefit from state externalization to increase their reliability, scalability, and inter-operability. To keep and share the externalized state, distributed data stores (DDSs) are a powerful tool allowing for the management of classical trade-offs in consistency, availability and partitioning tolerance. With the advent of Fog and Edge Computing, stateful applications and VNFs are pushed from the data centers toward the network edge. This poses new challenges on DDSs that are tailored to a deployment in Cloud data centers. In thi…
As wireless services and applications become more sophisticated and require faster and higher-capacity networks, there is a need for an efficient management of the execution of increasingly complex tasks based on the requirements of each application. In this regard, fog computing enables the integration of virtualized servers into networks and brings cloud services closer to end devices. In contrast to the cloud server, the computing capacity of fog nodes is limited and thus a single fog node might not be capable of computing-intensive tasks. In this context, task offloading can be particularl…
Fog/Edge computing is a novel computing paradigm supporting resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices by the placement of their tasks on the edge and/or cloud servers. Recently, several Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based placement techniques have been proposed in fog/edge computing environments, which are only suitable for centralized setups. The training of well-performed DRL agents requires manifold training data while obtaining training data is costly. Hence, these centralized DRL-based techniques lack generalizability and quick adaptability, thus failing to efficiently tac…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）
Fog nodes in the vicinity of IoT devices are promising to provision low latency services by offloading tasks from IoT devices to them. Mobile IoT is composed by mobile IoT devices such as vehicles, wearable devices and smartphones. Owing to the time-varying channel conditions, traffic loads and computing loads, it is challenging to improve the quality of service (QoS) of mobile IoT devices. As task delay consists of both the transmission delay and computing delay, we investigate the resource allocation (i.e., including both radio resource and computation resource) in both the wireless channel …
With the pervasiveness of IoT devices, smart-phones and improvement of location-tracking technologies huge volume of heterogeneous geo-tagged (location specific) data is generated which facilitates several location-aware services. The analytics with this spatio-temporal (having location and time dimensions) datasets provide varied important services such as, smart transportation, emergency services (health-care, national defence or urban planning). While cloud paradigm is suitable for the capability of storage and computation, the major bottleneck is network connectivity loss. In time-critical…
Emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) require latency-aware computation for real-time application processing. In IoT environments, connected things generate a huge amount of data, which are generally referred to as big data. Data generated from IoT devices are generally processed in a cloud infrastructure because of the on-demand services and scalability features of the cloud computing paradigm. However, processing IoT application requests on the cloud exclusively is not an efficient solution for some IoT applications, especially time-sensitive ones. To address this issue, Fo…
FedFog: Network-Aware Optimization of Federated Learning over Wireless Fog-Cloud Systems
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学安全、可靠性与信任跨学科中心（SnT））；School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学电子、电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Emerging technologies that generate a huge amount of data such as the Internet of Things (IoT) services need latency aware computing platforms to support time-critical applications. Due to the on-demand services and scalability features of cloud computing, Big Data application processing is done in the cloud infrastructure. Managing Big Data applications exclusively in the cloud is not an efficient solution for latency-sensitive applications related to smart transportation systems, healthcare solutions, emergency response systems and content delivery applications. Thus, the Fog computing parad…
Smart Farming has brought a major transformation in the agriculture process by using the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, emerging technologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, and data analytics. It allows farmers to have real-time awareness of the farm and help them make smart and informed decisions. In this paper, we propose a distributed data flow (DDF) based model for the smart farming application that is composed of interdependent modules. We evaluate the proposed application model using two deployment strategies: cloud-based, and fog-based where the application modules are deplo…
Volunteer computing is an Internet-based distributed computing system in which volunteers share their extra available resources to manage large-scale tasks. However, computing devices in a Volunteer Computing System (VCS) are highly dynamic and heterogeneous in terms of their processing power, monetary cost, and data transferring latency. To ensure both the high Quality of Service (QoS) and low cost for different requests, all of the available computing resources must be used efficiently. Task scheduling is an NP-hard problem that is considered one of the main critical challenges in a heteroge…
Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to …
Recently, fog computing has been introduced as a modern distributed paradigm and complement to cloud computing to provide services. Fog system extends storing and computing to the edge of the network, which can solve the problem about service computing of the delay-sensitive applications remarkably besides enabling the location awareness and mobility support. Load balancing is an important aspect of fog networks that avoids a situation with some under-loaded or overloaded fog nodes. Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as resource utilization, throughput, cost, response time, performance, …
In this paper, we focus on the problems of traffic engineering, failure recovery, fault prevention, and Service Function Chain (SFC) with reliability and energy consumption constraints in Software Defined Networks (SDN). These types of deployments use Fog computing as an emerging paradigm to manage the distributed small-size traffic flows passing through the SDN-enabled switches (possibly Fog Nodes). The main aim of this integration is to support service delivery in real-time, failure recovery, and fault-awareness in an SFC context. Firstly, we present an architecture for Failure Recovery and …
Software Defined Networks (SDNs) have dramatically simplified network management. However, enabling pure SDNs to respond in real-time while handling massive amounts of data still remains a challenging task. In contrast, fog computing has strong potential to serve large surges of data in real-time. SDN control plane enables innovation, and greatly simplifies network operations and management thereby providing a promising solution to implement energy and performance aware SDN-enabled fog computing. Besides, power efficiency and performance evaluation in SDN-enabled fog computing is an area that …
ReinFog: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Empowered Framework for Resource Management in Edge and Cloud Computing Environments
The Quantum Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (qCLOUDS) Laboratory, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学计算与信息学系量子云计算与分布式系统（qCLOUDS）实验室）；The Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University（莫纳什大学信息技术学院）
These days, the development of smart cities, specifically in location-aware, latency-sensitive, and security-crucial applications (such as emergency fire events, patient health monitoring, or real-time manufacturing) heavily depends on a more advance computing paradigms that can address these requirements. In this regard, fog computing, a robust cloud computing complement, plays a preponderant role by virtue of locating closer to the end-devices. Nonetheless, utilized approaches in smart cities are frequently cloud-based, which causes not only the security and time-sensitive services to suffer…
Information from surveillance video is essential for situational awareness (SAW). Nowadays, a prohibitively large amount of surveillance data is being generated continuously by ubiquitously distributed video sensors. It is very challenging to immediately identify the objects of interest or zoom in suspicious actions from thousands of video frames. Making the big data indexable is critical to tackle this problem. It is ideal to generate pattern indexes in a real-time, on-site manner on the video streaming instead of depending on the batch processing at the cloud centers. The modern edge-fog-clo…
