Efficient data offloading plays a pivotal role in computational-intensive platforms as data rate over wireless channels is fundamentally limited. On top of that, high mobility adds an extra burden in vehicular edge networks (VENs), bolstering the desire for efficient user-centric solutions. Therefore, unlike the legacy inflexible network-centric approach, this paper exploits a software-defined flexible, open, and programmable networking platform for an efficient user-centric, fast, reliable, and deadline-constrained offloading solution in VENs. In the proposed model, each active vehicle user (VU) is served from multiple low-powered access points (APs) by creating a noble virtual cell (VC). A joint node association, power allocation, and distributed resource allocation problem is formulated. As centralized learning is not practical in many real-world problems, following the distributed nature of autonomous VUs, each VU is considered an edge learning agent. To that end, considering practical location-aware node associations, a joint radio and power resource allocation non-cooperative stochastic game is formulated. Leveraging reinforcement learning's (RL) efficacy, a multi-agent RL (MARL) solution is proposed where the edge learners aim to learn the Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies to solve the game efficiently. Besides, real-world map data, with a practical microscopic mobility model, are used for the simulation. Results suggest that the proposed user-centric approach can deliver remarkable performances in VENs. Moreover, the proposed MARL solution delivers near-optimal performances with approximately 3% collision probabilities in case of distributed random access in the uplink.
In mobile computation offloading (MCO), mobile devices (MDs) can choose to either execute tasks locally or to have them executed on a remote edge server (ES). This paper addresses the problem of assigning both the wireless communication bandwidth needed, along with the ES capacity that is used for the task execution, so that task completion time constraints are satisfied. The objective is to obtain these allocations so that the average power consumption of the mobile devices is minimized, subject to a cost budget constraint. The paper includes contributions for both soft and hard task completi…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mounted base stations are a promising technology for monitoring smart farms. They can provide communication and computation services to extensive agricultural regions. With the assistance of a Multi-Access Edge Computing infrastructure, an aerial base station (ABS) network can provide an energy-efficient solution for smart farms that need to process deadline critical tasks fed by IoT devices deployed on the field. In this paper, we introduce a multi-objective maximization problem and a Q-Learning based method which aim to process these tasks before their de…
To accommodate the explosive growth in mobile data traffic, both mobile cellular operators and mobile users are increasingly interested in offloading the traffic from cellular networks to Wi-Fi networks. However, previously proposed offloading schemes mainly focus on reducing the cellular data usage, without paying too much attention on the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the applications. In this paper, we study the Wi-Fi offloading problem with delay-tolerant applications under usage-based pricing. We aim to achieve a good tradeoff between the user's payment and its QoS characterize…
In recent years, offloading mobile traffic through Wi-Fi has emerged as a potential solution to lower down the communication cost for mobile users. Users hope to reduce the cost while keeping the delay in an acceptable range through Wi-Fi offloading. Also, different users have different sensitivities to the cost and the delay performance. How to make a proper cost-delay tradeoff according to the user's preference is the key issue in the design of the offloading strategy. To address this issue, we propose a preference-oriented offloading strategy for current commercial terminals, which transmit…
With the advancement of IoT technology, various domains such as smart factories, smart cities and smart cars use the IoT to provide value-added services. In addition, technologies such as MEC and network slicing provide another opportunity for the IoT to support more advanced and real-time services that could not have been previously supported. However, the simple integration of such technologies into the IoT does not take full advantage of MEC and network slicing or the reduction of latency and traffic prioritization, respectively. Therefore, there is a strong need for an efficient integratio…
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are highly reliant on cloud systems to meet their storage and computational demands. However, due to the remote location of cloud servers, IoT devices often suffer from intermittent Wide Area Network (WAN) latency which makes execution of delay-critical IoT applications inconceivable. To overcome this, service providers (SPs) often deploy multiple fog nodes (FNs) at the network edge that helps in executing offloaded computations from IoT devices with improved user experience. As the FNs have limited resources, matching IoT services to FNs while ensuring min…
The widespread adoption of 5G cellular technology will evolve as one of the major drivers for the growth of IoT-based applications. In this paper, we consider a Service Provider (SP) that launches a smart city service based on IoT data readings: in order to serve IoT data collected across different locations, the SP dynamically negotiates and rescales bandwidth and service functions. 5G network slicing functions are key to lease an appropriate amount of resources over heterogeneous access technologies and different site types. Also, different infrastructure providers will charge slicing servic…
Edge computing is a promising approach for localized data processing for many edge applications and systems including Internet of Things (IoT), where computationally intensive tasks in IoT devices could be divided into sub-tasks and offloaded to other IoT devices, mobile devices, and / or servers at the edge. However, existing solutions on edge computing do not address the full range of challenges, specifically heterogeneity; edge devices are highly heterogeneous and dynamic in nature. In this paper, we develop a predictive edge computing framework with hard deadlines. Our algorithm; PrComp (i…
This paper studies the computational offloading of CNN inference in dynamic multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks. To address the uncertainties in communication time and Edge servers' available capacity, we use early-exit mechanism to terminate the computation earlier to meet the deadline of inference tasks. We design a reward function to trade off the communication, computation and inference accuracy, and formulate the offloading problem of CNN inference as a maximization problem with the goal of maximizing the average inference accuracy and throughput in long term. To solve the maximiza…
With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues, MUs should be able to decide whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN. Our previous work studied single-flow wireless LAN offloading from a MU's perspective by considering delay-tolerance of traffic, monetary co…
Network slicing is a promising approach for enabling low latency computation offloading in edge computing systems. In this paper, we consider an edge computing system under network slicing in which the wireless devices generate latency sensitive computational tasks. We address the problem of joint dynamic assignment of computational tasks to slices, management of radio resources across slices and management of radio and computing resources within slices. We formulate the Joint Slice Selection and Edge Resource Management(JSS-ERM) problem as a mixed-integer problem with the objective to minimiz…
Edge computing has been an efficient way to provide prompt and near-data computing services for resource-and-delay sensitive IoT applications via computation offloading. Effective computation offloading strategies need to comprehensively cope with several major issues, including the allocation of dynamic communication and computational resources, the deadline constraints of heterogeneous tasks, and the requirements for computationally inexpensive and distributed algorithms. However, most of the existing works mainly focus on part of these issues, which would not suffice to achieve expected per…
In mobile edge computing systems, an edge node may have a high load when a large number of mobile devices offload their tasks to it. Those offloaded tasks may experience large processing delay or even be dropped when their deadlines expire. Due to the uncertain load dynamics at the edge nodes, it is challenging for each device to determine its offloading decision (i.e., whether to offload or not, and which edge node it should offload its task to) in a decentralized manner. In this work, we consider non-divisible and delay-sensitive tasks as well as edge load dynamics, and formulate a task offl…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Intelligent Automation, Inc.（智能自动化公司）
The paper presents a reinforcement learning solution to dynamic resource allocation for 5G radio access network slicing. Available communication resources (frequency-time blocks and transmit powers) and computational resources (processor usage) are allocated to stochastic arrivals of network slice requests. Each request arrives with priority (weight), throughput, computational resource, and latency (deadline) requirements, and if feasible, it is served with available communication and computational resources allocated over its requested duration. As each decision of resource allocation makes s…
It is a big challenge for resource-limited mobile devices (MDs) to execute various complex and energy-consumed mobile applications. Fortunately, as a novel computing paradigm, edge computing (MEC) can provide abundant computing resources to execute all or parts of the tasks of MDs and thereby can greatly reduce the energy of MD and improve the QoS of applications. However, offloading workflow tasks to the MEC servers are liable to external security threats (e.g., snooping, alteration). In this paper, we propose a security and energy efficient computation offloading (SEECO) strategy for service…
To deploy machine learning-based algorithms for real-time applications with strict latency constraints, we consider an edge-computing setting where a subset of inputs are offloaded to the edge for processing by an accurate but resource-intensive model, and the rest are processed only by a less-accurate model on the device itself. Both models have computational costs that match available compute resources, and process inputs with low-latency. But offloading incurs network delays, and to manage these delays to meet application deadlines, we use a token bucket to constrain the average rate and bu…
Vehicular edge computing (VEC) becomes a promising paradigm for the development of emerging intelligent transportation systems. Nevertheless, the limited resources and massive transmission demands bring great challenges on implementing vehicular applications with stringent deadline requirements. This work presents a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based architecture in VEC, where heterogeneous edge nodes are cooperated for real-time task processing. We derive a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) transmission model by considering both intra-edge and inter-edge interferences and formulate a c…
Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as the enabling platform for a variety of promising applications, such as smart transportation and smart city, where massive devices are interconnected for data collection and processing. These IoT applications pose a high demand on storage and computing capacity, while the IoT devices are usually resource-constrained. As a potential solution, mobile edge computing (MEC) deploys cloud resources in the proximity of IoT devices so that their requests can be better served locally. In this work, we investigate computation offloading in a dynamic MEC system wi…
The Internet of Vehicles over Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks is an emerging technology enabling the development of smart city applications focused on improving traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and the overall driving experience. These applications have stringent requirements detailed in Service Level Agreement. Since vehicles have limited computational and storage capabilities, applications requests are offloaded onto an integrated edge-cloud computing system. Existing offloading solutions focus on optimizing the application's Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of execution time, and respecting a…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Intelligent Automation, Inc.（智能自动化公司）
Network slicing manages network resources as virtual resource blocks (RBs) for the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). Each communication request comes with quality of experience (QoE) requirements such as throughput and latency/deadline, which can be met by assigning RBs, communication power, and processing power to the request. For a completed request, the achieved reward is measured by the weight (priority) of this request. Then, the reward is maximized over time by allocating resources, e.g., with reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we introduce a novel flooding attack on 5G network sli…
Increasing wireless cellular networks capacity is one of the major challenges for the coming years, especially if we consider the annual doubling of mobile user traffic. Towards that and thanks to the fact that a significant amount of mobile data is indeed delay tolerable, in this paper, we suggest embedding the delayed offloading of some user traffic to be a part of future wireless cellular networks. To accomplish this, user delayed files will be offloaded using ultra-high speed Millimeter Wave (Mm-W) Gates. The Mm-W Gate, which will be distributed inside the Macro basestation (BS) area, cons…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
Aerial base stations (ABSs) allow smart farms to offload processing responsibility of complex tasks from internet of things (IoT) devices to ABSs. IoT devices have limited energy and computing resources, thus it is required to provide an advanced solution for a system that requires the support of ABSs. This paper introduces a novel multi-actor-based risk-sensitive reinforcement learning approach for ABS task scheduling for smart agriculture. The problem is defined as task offloading with a strict condition on completing the IoT tasks before their deadlines. Moreover, the algorithm must also co…
QECO: A QoE-Oriented Computation Offloading Algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Edge Computing
Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology（计算机工程系，谢赫拉特夫大学）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology（电气工程系，谢赫拉特夫大学）
With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on to which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues such as different applications' deadlines, monetary cost and energy consumption, how the MU decides whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN is an important issue. Previous studies assume the MU's mobility pat…
Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices can provide a powerful platform for local mobile cloud computing. The vision can be realized by peer-to-peer cooperative computing between edge devices, referred to as co-computing. This paper considers a co-computing system where a user offloads computation of input-data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process for the objective of minimizing the user's energy consumption based on a predicted helper's CPU-idling profile that specifies the amount of available computation resource for co-computin…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
The fifth and sixth generations of wireless communication networks are enabling tools such as internet of things devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and artificial intelligence, to improve the agricultural landscape using a network of devices to automatically monitor farmlands. Surveying a large area requires performing a lot of image classification tasks within a specific period of time in order to prevent damage to the farm in case of an incident, such as fire or flood. UAVs have limited energy and computing power, and may not be able to perform all of the intense image classification …
This paper describes a strategy that was designed, implemented, and presented at the {\it Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Interoperability and Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge 2013}. The theme of the MANIAC Challenge 2013 was ``Mobile Data Offloading,'' and consisted on developing and comparatively evaluating strategies to offload infrastructure access points via customer ad hoc forwarding using handheld devices (e.g., tablets and smartphones). According to the challenge rules, a hop-by-hop bidding contest (or ``auction'') should decide the path of each data packet towards its destination. Consequently…
Edge-Assisted Multi-View Localization for Low-Altitude Economy under GPS-Challenged Environments
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
PartialLoading: User Scheduling and Bandwidth Allocation for Parameter-sharing Edge Inference
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong（电子工程系，香港大学）；Hong Kong JC STEM Lab of Smart City（智慧城市JC STEM实验室）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（计算机科学系，城市大学）
