No Arabic abstract
As the amount of data collected for crowdsensing applications increases rapidly due to improved sensing capabilities and the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the cloud server is no longer able to handle the large-scale datasets individually. Given the improved computational capabilities of the edge devices, coded distributed computing has become a promising approach given that it allows computation tasks to be carried out in a distributed manner while mitigating straggler effects, which often account for the long overall completion times. Specifically, by using polynomial codes, computed results from only a subset of devices are needed to reconstruct the final result. However, there is no incentive for the edge devices to complete the computation tasks. In this paper, we present an all-pay auction to incentivize the edge devices to participate in the coded computation tasks. In this auction, the bids of the edge devices are represented by the allocation of their Central Processing Unit (CPU) power to the computation tasks. All edge devices submit their bids regardless of whether they win or lose in the auction. The all-pay auction is designed to maximize the utility of the cloud server by determining the reward allocation to the winners. Simulation results show that the edge devices are incentivized to allocate more CPU power when multiple rewards are offered instead of a single reward.
Coded distributed computing (CDC) has emerged as a promising approach because it enables computation tasks to be carried out in a distributed manner while mitigating straggler effects, which often account for the long overall completion times. Specifically, by using polynomial codes, computed results from only a subset of edge servers can be used to reconstruct the final result. However, incentive issues have not been studied systematically for the edge servers to complete the CDC tasks. In this paper, we propose a tractable two-level game-theoretic approach to incentivize the edge servers to complete the CDC tasks. Specifically, in the lower level, a hedonic coalition formation game is formulated where the edge servers share their resources within their coalitions. By forming coalitions, the edge servers have more Central Processing Unit (CPU) power to complete the computation tasks. In the upper level, given the CPU power of the coalitions of edge servers, an all-pay auction is designed to incentivize the edge servers to participate in the CDC tasks. In the all-pay auction, the bids of the edge servers are represented by the allocation of their CPU power to the CDC tasks. The all-pay auction is designed to maximize the utility of the cloud server by determining the allocation of rewards to the winners. Simulation results show that the edge servers are incentivized to allocate more CPU power when multiple rewards are offered, i.e., there are multiple winners, instead of rewarding only the edge server with the largest CPU power allocation. Besides, the utility of the cloud server is maximized when it offers multiple homogeneous rewards, instead of heterogeneous rewards.
With the mass deployment of computing-intensive applications and delay-sensitive applications on end devices, only adequate computing resources can meet differentiated services delay requirements. By offloading tasks to cloud servers or edge servers, computation offloading can alleviate computing and storage limitations and reduce delay and energy consumption. However, few of the existing offloading schemes take into consideration the cloud-edge collaboration and the constraint of energy consumption and task dependency. This paper builds a collaborative computation offloading model in cloud and edge computing and formulates a multi-objective optimization problem. Constructed by fusing optimal transport and Policy-Based RL, we propose an Optimal-Transport-Based RL approach to resolve the offloading problem and make the optimal offloading decision for minimizing the overall cost of delay and energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the cost and significantly outperforms existing optimization solutions.
The Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm has a lot of potential as a computing model for fog environments comprising both cloud and edge nodes. When the request rate exceeds capacity limits at the edge, some functions need to be offloaded from the edge towards the cloud. In this paper, we present an auction-inspired approach in which application developers bid on resources while fog nodes decide locally which functions to execute and which to offload in order to maximize revenue. We evaluate our approach through a number of simulations, our proof-of-concept prototype AuctionWhisk, and a number of experiments with AuctionWhisk.
As novel applications spring up in future network scenarios, the requirements on network service capabilities for differentiated services or burst services are diverse. Aiming at the research of collaborative computing and resource allocation in edge scenarios, migrating computing tasks to the edge and cloud for computing requires a comprehensive consideration of energy consumption, bandwidth, and delay. Our paper proposes a collaboration mechanism based on computation offloading, which is flexible and customizable to meet the diversified requirements of differentiated networks. This mechanism handles the terminals differentiated computing tasks by establishing a collaborative computation offloading model between the cloud server and edge server. Experiments show that our method has more significant improvements over regular optimization algorithms, including reducing the execution time of computing tasks, improving the utilization of server resources, and decreasing the terminals energy consumption.
In this work we study biological neural networks from an algorithmic perspective, focusing on understanding tradeoffs between computation time and network complexity. Our goal is to abstract real neural networks in a way that, while not capturing all interesting features, preserves high-level behavior and allows us to make biologically relevant conclusions. Towards this goal, we consider the implementation of algorithmic primitives in a simple yet biologically plausible model of $stochastic spiking neural networks$. In particular, we show how the stochastic behavior of neurons in this model can be leveraged to solve a basic $symmetry-breaking task$ in which we are given neurons with identical firing rates and want to select a distinguished one. In computational neuroscience, this is known as the winner-take-all (WTA) problem, and it is believed to serve as a basic building block in many tasks, e.g., learning, pattern recognition, and clustering. We provide efficient constructions of WTA circuits in our stochastic spiking neural network model, as well as lower bounds in terms of the number of auxiliary neurons required to drive convergence to WTA in a given number of steps. These lower bounds demonstrate that our constructions are near-optimal in some cases. This work covers and gives more in-depth proofs of a subset of results originally published in [LMP17a]. It is adapted from the last chapter of C. Muscos Ph.D. thesis [Mus18].