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 service depending on specific access technology supported across sites and IoT data collection patterns.
We introduce a pricing mechanism based on Age of Information (AoI) to reduce the cost of SPs. It provides incentives for devices to smooth traffic by shifting part of the traffic load from highly congested and more expensive locations to lesser charged ones, while meeting QoS requirements of the IoT service. The proposed optimal pricing scheme comprises a two-stage decision process, where the SP determines the pricing of each location and devices schedule uploads of collected data based on the optimal uploading policy. Simulations show that the SP attains consistent cost reductions tuning the trade-off between slicing costs and the AoI of uploaded IoT data.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices can apply mobile-edge computing (MEC) and energy harvesting (EH) to provide the satisfactory quality of experiences for computation intensive applications and prolong the battery lifetime. In this article, we investigate the computation offloading for IoT devices with energy harvesting in wireless networks with multiple MEC devices such as base stations and access points, each with different computation resource and radio communication capability. We propose a reinforcement learning based computation offloading framework for an IoT device to choose the MEC devi…
With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming a major component of our daily life, understanding how to improve the quality of service (QoS) for IoT applications through fog computing is becoming an important problem. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for IoT-fog-cloud applications, and propose a delay-minimizing collaboration and offloading policy for fog-capable devices that aims to reduce the service delay for IoT applications. We then develop an analytical model to evaluate our policy and show how the proposed framework helps to reduce IoT service delay.
One of the main drivers of 5G cellular networks is provision of connectivity service for various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Considering the potential volume of IoT devices at a global scale, the next leap is to integrate Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) into 5G terrestrial systems, thereby extend the coverage and complement the terrestrial service. This paper focuses on the use of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations for two specific purposes: offloading and backhauling. The former allows offloading IoT traffic from a congested terrestrial network, usually in a very dense area. …
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks, edge computing is offering new opportunities for business model and use cases innovations. Service providers can now virtualize the cloud beyond the data center to meet the latency, data sovereignty, reliability, and interoperability requirements. Yet, many new applications (e.g., augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence) are computation-intensive and delay-sensitivity. These applications are invoked heavily with similar inputs that could lead to the same output. Compute-less networks aim to implement a network…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We consider computation offloading for Internet-of-things (IoT) applications in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) cloud-radio-access-network (C-RAN). Due to the limited battery life and computational capability in the IoT devices (IoTDs), the computational tasks of the IoTDs are offloaded to a MIMO C-RAN, where a MIMO radio resource head (RRH) is connected to a baseband unit (BBU) through a capacity-limited fronthaul link, facilitated by the spatial filtering and uniform scalar quantization. We formulate a computation offloading optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power of …
Mobile devices have become an indispensable component of Internet of Things (IoT). However, these devices have resource constraints in processing capabilities, battery power, and storage space, thus hindering the execution of computation-intensive applications that often require broad bandwidth, stringent response time, long battery life, and heavy computing power. Mobile cloud computing and mobile edge computing (MEC) are emerging technologies that can meet the aforementioned requirements using offloading algorithms. In this paper, we analyze the effect of platform-dependent native applicatio…
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…
Fog computing, which provides low-latency computing services at the network edge, is an enabler for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this paper, we study the allocation of fog computing resources to the IoT users in a hierarchical computing paradigm including fog and remote cloud computing services. We formulate a computation offloading game to model the competition between IoT users and allocate the limited processing power of fog nodes efficiently. Each user aims to maximize its own quality of experience (QoE), which reflects its satisfaction of using computing services in t…
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）
In fog-assisted IoT systems, it is a common practice to offload tasks from IoT devices to their nearby fog nodes to reduce task processing latencies and energy consumptions. However, the design of online energy-efficient scheme is still an open problem because of various uncertainties in system dynamics such as processing capacities and transmission rates. Moreover, the decision-making process is constrained by resource limits on fog nodes and IoT devices, making the design even more complicated. In this paper, we formulate such a task offloading problem with unknown system dynamics as a combi…
Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) server in the mobile blockchain-enabled Internet of things (IoT) system is a promising approach to improve the system performance, however, it imposes a significant challenge on the trust of MEC server. To address this problem, we first propose an untrusted MEC proof of work scheme in mobile blockchain network where plenty of nonce hash computing demands can be offloaded to MEC server. Then, we design a nonce ordering algorithm for this scheme to provide fairer computing resource allocation for all mobile IoT devices/users. Specifically, we formulate the u…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
A deep reinforcement learning technique is presented for task offloading decision-making algorithms for a multi-access edge computing (MEC) assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network in a smart farm Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The task offloading technique uses financial concepts such as cost functions and conditional variable at risk (CVaR) in order to quantify the damage that may be caused by each risky action. The approach was able to quantify potential risks to train the reinforcement learning agent to avoid risky behaviors that will lead to irreversible consequences for the …
The development of mobile communication technology, hardware, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology has promoted the application of edge computing in the field of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT). In order to overcome the defects of the traditional cloud computing model in the era of big data. In this article, we first propose a new AIenabled smart edge with heterogeneous IoT architecture which combines edge computing, caching, and communication. Then, we propose the Smart-Edge-CoCaCo algorithm. To minimize total delay and confirm the computation offloading d…
The freshness of status information is of great importance for time-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A metric measuring status freshness is the age-of-information (AoI), which captures the time elapsed from the status being generated at the source node (e.g., a sensor) to the latest status update.However, in intelligent IoT applications such as video surveillance, the status information is revealed after some computation intensive and time-consuming data processing operations, which would affect the status freshness. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, age-of-processing (A…
Fog computing enables use cases where data produced in end devices are stored, processed, and acted on directly at the edges of the network, yet computation can be offloaded to more powerful instances through the edge to cloud continuum. Such offloading mechanism is especially needed in case of modern multi-purpose IoT gateways, where both demand and operation conditions can vary largely between deployments. To facilitate the development and operations of gateways, we implement offloading directly as part of the IoT rapid prototyping process embedded in the software stack, based on Node-RED. W…
Fog computing can be used to offload computationally intensive tasks from battery powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although it reduces energy required for computations in an IoT device, it uses energy for communications with the fog. This paper analyzes when usage of fog computing is more energy efficient than local computing. Detailed energy consumption models are built in both scenarios with the focus set on the relation between energy consumption and distortion introduced by a Power Amplifier (PA). Numerical results show that task offloading to a fog is the most energy efficient fo…
The ubiquitous nature of IoT devices has brought new and exciting applications in computing and communication paradigms. Due to its ability to enable auto-configurable communication between IoT devices, pervasive applications, and remote clients, the use of the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is widespread. However, the advertisement and discovery mechanism of UPnP incurs significant overhead on resource-constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a delegation-based approach that extends the UPnP protocol by offloading the service advertisement and discovery-related overhead fro…
With the development of next-generation wireless networks, the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving towards the intelligent IoT (iIoT), where intelligent applications usually have stringent delay and jitter requirements. In order to provide low-latency services to heterogeneous users in the emerging iIoT, multi-tier computing was proposed by effectively combining edge computing and fog computing. More specifically, multi-tier computing systems compensate for cloud computing through task offloading and dispersing computing tasks to multi-tier nodes along the continuum from the cloud to things. …
Intelligent edge network is maturing to enable smart and efficient transportation systems. In this letter, we consider unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicular networks where UAVs provide caching and computing services in complement with base station (BS). One major challenge is that vehicles need to obtain timely situational awareness via orchestration of ubiquitous caching and computing resources. Note that cached data for vehicles' perception tasks contains time-varying context information, thus freshness of cached data should be considered in conjunction with task execution to guar…
The vision of pervasive machine learning (ML) services can be realized by training an ML model on time using real-time data collected by internet of things (IoT) devices. To this end, IoT devices require offloading their data to an edge server in proximity. On the other hand, high dimensional data with a heavy volume causes a significant burden to an IoT device with a limited energy budget. To cope with the limitation, we propose a novel offloading architecture, called joint data deepening and prefetching (JD2P), which is feature-by-feature offloading comprising two key techniques. The first o…
In this paper, we propose a federated deep reinforcement learning framework to solve a multi-objective optimization problem, where we consider minimizing the expected long-term task completion delay and energy consumption of IoT devices. This is done by optimizing offloading decisions, computation resource allocation, and transmit power allocation. Since the formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP), we first cast our problem as a multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) problem and address it using double deep Q-network (DDQN), where the actions are…
Multi-Agent RL-Based Industrial AIGC Service Offloading over Wireless Edge Networks
School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子信息与电气工程学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security（上海信息安全综合管理技术重点实验室）；California Polytechnic State University（加州州立理工大学）
With the explosive increment of computation requirements, the multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm appears as an effective mechanism. Besides, as for the Internet of Things (IoT) in disasters or remote areas requiring MEC services, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and high altitude platforms (HAPs) are available to provide aerial computing services for these IoT devices. In this paper, we develop the hierarchical aerial computing framework composed of HAPs and UAVs, to provide MEC services for various IoT applications. In particular, the problem is formulated to maximize the total IoT dat…
Wireless powered mobile-edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance the data processing capability of low-power networks, such as wireless sensor networks and internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we consider a wireless powered MEC network that adopts a binary offloading policy, so that each computation task of wireless devices (WDs) is either executed locally or fully offloaded to an MEC server. Our goal is to acquire an online algorithm that optimally adapts task offloading decisions and wireless resource allocations to the time-varying wireless channel co…
The tremendous advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly involve computationally intensive services. These services often require more computation resources than can entirely be satisfied on local IoT devices. Cloud computing is traditionally used to provide unlimited computation resources at distant servers. However, such remote computation may not address the short-delay constraints that many of today's IoT applications require. Edge computing allows offloading computing close to end users to overcome computation and delay issues. Nonetheless, the edge servers may suffer from…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is one of the promising solutions to process computational-intensive tasks within short latency for emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) use cases, e.g., virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), autonomous vehicle. Due to the coexistence of heterogeneous services in MEC system, the task arrival interval and required execution time can vary depending on services. It is challenging to schedule computation resource for the services with stochastic arrivals and runtime at an edge server (ES). In this paper, we propose a flexible computation offloading framework among …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Telecom Sud Paris（南巴黎电信学院）；Institut Mines Telecom（矿业电信学院）；Paris-Saclay University（巴黎-萨克雷大学）
Advances in deep neural networks (DNN) greatly bolster real-time detection of anomalous IoT data. However, IoT devices can hardly afford complex DNN models, and offloading anomaly detection tasks to the cloud incurs long delay. In this paper, we propose and build a demo for an adaptive anomaly detection approach for distributed hierarchical edge computing (HEC) systems to solve this problem, for both univariate and multivariate IoT data. First, we construct multiple anomaly detection DNN models with increasing complexity, and associate each model with a layer in HEC from bottom to top. Then, w…
With the current exponential growth in traffic and service demands, device-to-device (D2D) cooperation is identified as a major mechanism to enable 5G networks to effectively and efficiently augment network resources. The effectiveness of D2D cooperation depends on a wide range of decision making processes that include cluster formation, resource allocation, in addition to connection and mobility management. Irrespective of the D2D cooperation scenario whether in sensor, ad hoc, or cellular networks, the literature normally assumes that devices selected as relays or data sources are reliable; …
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been regarded as a promising paradigm to reduce service latency for data processing in the Internet of Things, by provisioning computing resources at the network edge. In this work, we jointly optimize the task partitioning and computational power allocation for computation offloading in a dynamic environment with multiple IoT devices and multiple edge servers. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process with constrained hybrid action space, which cannot be well handled by existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms. Therefore, we develop a n…
To date, group-oriented communications have been mainly exploited for delivering multimedia services in human-oriented communications while, in future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks, objects will be the main target. Internet of Things (IoT) will undoubtedly play a key role in 5G networks, wherein massive machine-type communications (mMTC) feature a use case as crucial as challenging since cellular IoT connections are predicted to grow heavily in the next future. To boost capacity and energy efficiency, the 5G network can leverage device-to-device (D2D) communications which are recogni…
China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoTs), an increasing number of computation intensive or delay sensitive biomedical data processing and analysis tasks are produced in vehicles, bringing more and more challenges to the biometric monitoring of drivers. Edge computing is a new paradigm to solve these challenges by offloading tasks from the resource-limited vehicles to Edge Servers (ESs) in Road Side Units (RSUs). However, most of the traditional offloading schedules for vehicular networks concentrate on the edge, while some tasks may be too comple…
Edge Computing (EC) is about remodeling the way data is handled, processed, and delivered within a vast heterogeneous network. One of the fundamental concepts of EC is to push the data processing near the edge by exploiting front-end devices with powerful computation capabilities. Thus, limiting the use of centralized architecture, such as cloud computing, to only when it is necessary. This paper proposes a novel edge computer offloading technique that assigns computational tasks generated by devices to potential edge computers with enough computational resources. The proposed approach cluster…
In this work, we propose a cross-layer framework for optimizing user association, packet offloading rates, and bandwidth allocation for Mission-Critical Internet-of-Things (MC-IoT) services with short packets in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems, where enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) services with long packets are considered as background services. To reduce communication delay, the 5th generation new radio is adopted in radio access networks. To avoid long queueing delay for short packets from MC-IoT, Processor-Sharing (PS) servers are deployed at MEC systems, where the service rate of the…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；SAMOVAR（萨莫瓦实验室）；Telecom Sud Paris（巴黎南部电信学院）；Institut Mines-Telecom（矿业电信学院）；Paris-Saclay University（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Advances in deep neural networks (DNN) greatly bolster real-time detection of anomalous IoT data. However, IoT devices can barely afford complex DNN models due to limited computational power and energy supply. While one can offload anomaly detection tasks to the cloud, it incurs long delay and requires large bandwidth when thousands of IoT devices stream data to the cloud concurrently. In this paper, we propose an adaptive anomaly detection approach for hierarchical edge computing (HEC) systems to solve this problem. Specifically, we first construct three anomaly detection DNN models of increa…
