No Arabic abstract
In modern distributed computing systems, unpredictable and unreliable infrastructures result in high variability of computing resources. Meanwhile, there is significantly increasing demand for timely and event-driven services with deadline constraints. Motivated by measurements over Amazon EC2 clusters, we consider a two-state Markov model for variability of computing speed in cloud networks. In this model, each worker can be either in a good state or a bad state in terms of the computation speed, and the transition between these states is modeled as a Markov chain which is unknown to the scheduler. We then consider a Coded Computing framework, in which the data is possibly encoded and stored at the worker nodes in order to provide robustness against nodes that may be in a bad state. With timely computation requests submitted to the system with computation deadlines, our goal is to design the optimal computation-load allocation scheme and the optimal data encoding scheme that maximize the timely computation throughput (i.e, the average number of computation tasks that are accomplished before their deadline). Our main result is the development of a dynamic computation strategy called Lagrange Estimate-and Allocate (LEA) strategy, which achieves the optimal timely computation throughput. It is shown that compared to the static allocation strategy, LEA increases the timely computation throughput by 1.4X - 17.5X in various scenarios via simulations and by 1.27X - 6.5X in experiments over Amazon EC2 clusters
The growing size of modern datasets necessitates splitting a large scale computation into smaller computations and operate in a distributed manner. Adversaries in a distributed system deliberately send erroneous data in order to affect the computation for their benefit. Boolean functions are the key components of many applications, e.g., verification functions in blockchain systems and design of cryptographic algorithms. We consider the problem of computing a Boolean function in a distributed computing system with particular focus on emph{security against Byzantine workers}. Any Boolean function can be modeled as a multivariate polynomial with high degree in general. However, the security threshold (i.e., the maximum number of adversarial workers can be tolerated such that the correct results can be obtained) provided by the recent proposed Lagrange Coded Computing (LCC) can be extremely low if the degree of the polynomial is high. We propose three different schemes called emph{coded Algebraic normal form (ANF)}, emph{coded Disjunctive normal form (DNF)} and emph{coded polynomial threshold function (PTF)}. The key idea of the proposed schemes is to model it as the concatenation of some low-degree polynomials and threshold functions. In terms of the security threshold, we show that the proposed coded ANF and coded DNF are optimal by providing a matching outer bound.
Distributed computing has become a common approach for large-scale computation of tasks due to benefits such as high reliability, scalability, computation speed, and costeffectiveness. However, distributed computing faces critical issues related to communication load and straggler effects. In particular, computing nodes need to exchange intermediate results with each other in order to calculate the final result, and this significantly increases communication overheads. Furthermore, a distributed computing network may include straggling nodes that run intermittently slower. This results in a longer overall time needed to execute the computation tasks, thereby limiting the performance of distributed computing. To address these issues, coded distributed computing (CDC), i.e., a combination of coding theoretic techniques and distributed computing, has been recently proposed as a promising solution. Coding theoretic techniques have proved effective in WiFi and cellular systems to deal with channel noise. Therefore, CDC may significantly reduce communication load, alleviate the effects of stragglers, provide fault-tolerance, privacy and security. In this survey, we first introduce the fundamentals of CDC, followed by basic CDC schemes. Then, we review and analyze a number of CDC approaches proposed to reduce the communication costs, mitigate the straggler effects, and guarantee privacy and security. Furthermore, we present and discuss applications of CDC in modern computer networks. Finally, we highlight important challenges and promising research directions related to CDC
Federated Learning (FL) is an exciting new paradigm that enables training a global model from data generated locally at the client nodes, without moving client data to a centralized server. Performance of FL in a multi-access edge computing (MEC) network suffers from slow convergence due to heterogeneity and stochastic fluctuations in compute power and communication link qualities across clients. A recent work, Coded Federated Learning (CFL), proposes to mitigate stragglers and speed up training for linear regression tasks by assigning redundant computations at the MEC server. Coding redundancy in CFL is computed by exploiting statistical properties of compute and communication delays. We develop CodedFedL that addresses the difficult task of extending CFL to distributed non-linear regression and classification problems with multioutput labels. The key innovation of our work is to exploit distributed kernel embedding using random Fourier features that transforms the training task into distributed linear regression. We provide an analytical solution for load allocation, and demonstrate significant performance gains for CodedFedL through experiments over benchmark datasets using practical network parameters.
With recent advancements in edge computing capabilities, there has been a significant increase in utilizing the edge cloud for event-driven and time-sensitive computations. However, large-scale edge computing networks can suffer substantially from unpredictable and unreliable computing resources which can result in high variability of service quality. Thus, it is crucial to design efficient task scheduling policies that guarantee quality of service and the timeliness of computation queries. In this paper, we study the problem of computation offloading over unknown edge cloud networks with a sequence of timely computation jobs. Motivated by the MapReduce computation paradigm, we assume each computation job can be partitioned to smaller Map functions that are processed at the edge, and the Reduce function is computed at the user after the Map results are collected from the edge nodes. We model the service quality (success probability of returning result back to the user within deadline) of each edge device as function of context (collection of factors that affect edge devices). The user decides the computations to offload to each device with the goal of receiving a recoverable set of computation results in the given deadline. Our goal is to design an efficient edge computing policy in the dark without the knowledge of the context or computation capabilities of each device. By leveraging the emph{coded computing} framework in order to tackle failures or stragglers in computation, we formulate this problem using contextual-combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CC-MAB), and aim to maximize the cumulative expected reward. We propose an online learning policy called emph{online coded edge computing policy}, which provably achieves asymptotically-optimal performance in terms of regret loss compared with the optimal offline policy for the proposed CC-MAB problem.
In this paper we study the deployment of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to form a temporal UAV network for the provisioning of emergent communications to affected people in a disaster zone, where each UAV is equipped with a lightweight base station device and thus can act as an aerial base station for users. Unlike most existing studies that assumed that a UAV can serve all users in its communication range, we observe that both computation and communication capabilities of a single lightweight UAV are very limited, due to various constraints on its size, weight, and power supply. Thus, a single UAV can only provide communication services to a limited number of users. We study a novel problem of deploying $K$ UAVs in the top of a disaster area such that the sum of the data rates of users served by the UAVs is maximized, subject to that (i) the number of users served by each UAV is no greater than its service capacity; and (ii) the communication network induced by the $K$ UAVs is connected. We then propose a $frac{1-1/e}{lfloor sqrt{K} rfloor}$-approximation algorithm for the problem, improving the current best result of the problem by five times (the best approximation ratio so far is $frac{1-1/e}{5( sqrt{K} +1)}$), where $e$ is the base of the natural logarithm. We finally evaluate the algorithm performance via simulation experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very promising. Especially, the solution delivered by the proposed algorithm is up to 12% better than those by existing algorithms.