关键词： mobile edge computing   crowd participation   opportunistic caching   data forwarding  

摘要： Mobile edge computing is a new communication paradigm, which stores content close to the end users, so as to reduce the backhaul delay and alleviate the traffic load of the backbone networks. Crowd participation is one of the most striking features of this technology, and it enables numerous interesting applications. The dynamics of crowd participation offer unprecedented opportunities for both content caching and data forwarding. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the dynamics of crowd participation, from the perspective of opportunistic caching and forwarding, and discuss how we can exploit such opportunities to allocate content and select relays efficiently. Some existing issues in this emerging research area are also discussed.

关键词： multi-access   mobile edge computing   computational power allocation   optimization   Blockchain  

摘要： Blockchain has emerged as a decentralized and trustable ledger for recording and storing digital transactions. The mining process of Blockchain, however, incurs a heavy computational workload for miners to solve the proof-of-work puzzle (i.e., a series of the hashing computation), which is prohibitive from the perspective of the mobile terminals (MTs). The advanced multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables the MTs to offload part of the computational workloads (for solving the proof-of-work) to the nearby edge-servers (ESs), provides a promising approach to address this issue. By offloading the computational workloads via multi-access MEC, the MTs can effectively increase their successful probabilities when participating in the mining game and gain the consequent reward (i.e., winning the bitcoin). However, as a compensation to the ESs which provide the computational resources to the MTs, the MTs need to pay the ESs for the corresponding resource-acquisition costs. Thus, to investigate the trade-off between obtaining the computational resources from the ESs (for solving the proof-of-work) and paying for the consequent cost, we formulate an optimization problem in which the MTs determine their acquired computational resources from different ESs, with the objective of maximizing the MTs' social net-reward in the mining process while keeping the fairness among the MTs. In spite of the non-convexity of the formulated problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose efficient distributed algorithms for the MTs to individually determine their optimal computational resources acquired from different ESs. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance of our proposed multi-access MEC for Blockchain.

关键词： Vehicular Ad-hoc networks   Content delivery service   Mobile edge computing   Software defined systems   Internet of things   Intelligent transportation systems  

摘要： Next-generation smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) are getting more mature in terms of services and infrastructure requirements. Multiple smart vehicle applications are being conceived these days, including road traffic, road safety and infotainment, all of which are suffering from the WAN-latency problem. In this paper, we propose a Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET)-based Software-Defined Edge Computing infrastructure supporting content delivery services among connected vehicles. The proposed approach leverages network base stations to embed mobile edge computing (MEC) services closer to the vehicles. Our approach can enable the delivery of more competitive services with reduced-latency by utilizing cooperative MEC search strategy for vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications as well as utilizing vehicle-level caching for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications between peers. The framework prototype has been implemented as a clean extension of the Mininet-WiFi emulator. Preliminary results serve as validation of the proposed framework and point out the potential benefits of the approach in mitigating WAN-latency in VANET.

关键词： Video rate adaptation   mobile edge computing   in-network caching   software-defined mobile networks   traffic engineering  

摘要： Recent advances in software-defined mobile networks (SDMNs), in-network caching, and mobile edge computing (MEC) can have significant effects on video services in next generation mobile networks. In this paper, we jointly consider SDMNs, in-network caching, and MEC to enhance the video service in next generation mobile networks. We use a new video experience evaluation standard called U-video mean opinion score (vMOS), which is a more advanced measurement of the video quality based on the well-known vMOS. With the objective of maximizing the mean U-vMOS, an optimization problem is formulated. Due to the coupling of video data rate, computing resource, and traffic engineering (bandwidth provisioning and paths selection), the problem becomes intractable in practice. Thus, we utilize a dual-decomposition method to decouple those three sets of variables. By this decoupling, video rate adaptation is performed at users with network assistants. End nodes can schedule computing resource independently. Traffic engineering is performed by the software-defined networking controller and base stations. Furthermore, to address the challenges of dynamic change of network status and the drawbacks caused by the frequent exchange of information, we design a decentralized algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers to solve the traffic engineering problem. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system configurations to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

关键词： mobile edge computing   security models   data processing offloading   multi-tier architectures  

摘要： Current mobile devices need to run applications with high computational demands and critical response times. The mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm was developed to improve the performance of these devices. This new computation architecture allows for the mobile devices to execute applications on fog nodes at the network edge;this process is called data processing offloading. This article presents a security model for the externalization of application execution in multi-tier MEC environments. The principal novelty of this study is that the model is able to modify the required security level in each tier of the distributed architecture as a function of the degree of trust associated with that tier. The basic idea is that a higher degree of trust requires a lower level of security, and vice versa. A formal framework is introduced that represents the general environment of application execution in distributed MEC architectures. An architecture is proposed that allows for deployment of the model in production environments and is implemented for evaluation purposes. The results show that the security model can be applied in multi-tier MEC architectures and that the model produces a minimal overhead, especially for computationally intensive applications.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   service placement   Lyapunov optimization   Markov approximation   game theory  

摘要： Mobile edge computing is a new computing paradigm, which pushes cloud computing capabilities away from the centralized cloud to the network edge. However, with the sinking of computing capabilities, the new challenge incurred by user mobility arises: since end users typically move erratically, the services should be dynamically migrated among multiple edges to maintain the service performance, i.e., user-perceived latency. Tackling this problem is non-trivial since frequent service migration would greatly increase the operational cost. To address this challenge in terms of the performance-cost tradeoff, in this paper, we study the mobile edge service performance optimization problem under long-term cost budget constraint. To address user mobility which is typically unpredictable, we apply Lyapunov optimization to decompose the long-term optimization problem into a series of real-time optimization problems which do not require a priori knowledge such as user mobility. As the decomposed problem is NP-hard, we first design an approximation algorithm based on Markov approximation to seek a near-optimal solution. To make our solution scalable and amenable to future fifth-generation application scenario with large-scale user devices, we further propose a distributed approximation scheme with greatly reduced time complexity, based on the technique of the best response update. Rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed centralized and distributed schemes.

关键词： Mobile Edge Computing   Policy-based Cloud Management   Energy-aware Edge Routing   Low-latency Visual Data Processing  

摘要： New paradigms such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are becoming feasible for use in, e.g., real-time decision-making during disaster incident response to handle the data deluge occurring in the network edge. However, MEC deployments today lack flexible IoT device data handling such as handling user preferences for real-time versus energy-efficient processing. Moreover, MEC can also benefit from a policy-based edge routing to handle sustained performance levels with efficient energy consumption. In this paper, we study the potential of MEC to address application issues related to energy management on constrained IoT devices with limited power sources, while also providing low-latency processing of visual data being generated at high resolutions. Using a facial recognition application that is important in disaster incident response scenarios, we propose a novel "offload decision-making" algorithm that analyzes the tradeoffs in computing policies to offload visual data processing (i.e., to an edge cloud or a core cloud) at low-to-high workloads. This algorithm also analyzes the impact on energy consumption in the decision-making under different visual data consumption requirements (i.e., users with thick clients or thin clients). To address the processing-throughput versus energy-efficiency tradeoffs, we propose a "Sustainable Policy-based Intelligence-Driven Edge Routing" algorithm that uses machine learning within Mobile Ad hoc Networks. This algorithm is energy aware and improves the geographic routing baseline performance (i.e., minimizes impact of local minima) for throughput performance sustainability, while also enabling flexible policy specification. We evaluate our proposed algorithms by conducting experiments on a realistic edge and core cloud test-bed in the GENT Cloud infrastructure, and recreate disaster scenes of tornado damages within simulations. Our empirical results show how MEC can provide flexibility to users who desire energy conservation over low l

关键词： 5G and beyond   mobile edge computing   resource optimization   ultrareliable low-latency communication  

摘要： Ensuring ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) for 5G wireless networks and beyond is of capital importance and is currently receiving tremendous attention in academia and industry. At its core, URLLC mandates a departure from expected utility-based network design approaches, in which relying on average quantities (e.g., average throughput, average delay, and average response time) is no longer an option but a necessity. Instead, a principled and scalable framework which takes into account delay, reliability, packet size, network architecture and topology (across access, edge, and core), and decision-making under uncertainty is sorely lacking. The overarching goal of this paper is a first step to filling this void. Towards this vision, after providing definitions of latency and reliability, we closely examine various enablers of URLLC and their inherent tradeoffs. Subsequently, we focus our attention on a wide variety of techniques and methodologies pertaining to the requirements of URLLC, as well as their applications through selected use cases. These results provide crisp insights for the design of low-latency and high-reliability wireless networks.

关键词： QoS   QoE   Mobile edge computing   Fog computing   Distributed ledger technology   Blockchain  

摘要： Network Quality of Service (QoS) and the associated user Quality of Experience (QoE) have always been the networking "holy grail" and have been sought after through various different approaches and networking technologies over the last decades. Despite substantial amounts of effort invested in the area, there has been very little actual deployment of mechanisms to guarantee QoS in the Internet. As a result, the Internet is largely operating on a "best effort" basis in terms of QoS. Here, we attempt a historical overview in order to better understand how we got to the point where we are today and consider the evolution of QoS/QoE in the future. As we move towards more demanding networking environments where enormous amounts of data is produced at the edge of the network (e.g., from IoT devices), computation will also need to migrate to the edge in order to guarantee QoS. In turn, we argue that distributed computing at the edge of the network will inevitably require infrastructure decentralisation. That said, trust to the infrastructure provider is more difficult to guarantee and new components need to be incorporated into the Internet landscape in order to be able to support emerging applications, but also achieve acceptable service quality. We start from the first steps of ATM and related IP-based technologies, we consider recent proposals for content-oriented and Information-Centric Networking, mobile edge and fog computing, and finally we see how distributed Internet governance through Distributed Ledger Technology and blockchains can influence QoS in future networks.

关键词： Connected vehicle network   Internet of Things   delay-tolerant data   mobile edge computing   software-defined networking   smart city  

摘要： With the explosion in the number of connected devices and Internet of Things (IoT) services in smart city, the challenges to meet the demands from both data traffic delivery and information processing are increasingly prominent. Meanwhile, the connected vehicle networks have become an essential part in smart city, bringing massive data traffic as well as significant communication, caching, and computing resources. As the two typical services types in smart city, delay-tolerant and delay-sensitive traffic requires very different quality of service (QoS)/quality of experience (QoE), and could be delivered through the routes with different features to meet their QoS/QoE requirements with the lowest costs. In this paper, we propose a novel vehicle network architecture in the smart city scenario, mitigating the network congestion with the joint optimization of networking, caching, and computing resources. Cloud computing at the data centers as well as mobile edge computing at the evolved node Bs and on-board units are taken as the paradigms to provide caching and computing resources. The programmable control principle originated from the software-defined networking paradigm has been introduced into this architecture to facilitate the system optimization and resource integration. With the careful modeling of the services, the vehicle mobility, and the system state, a joint resource management scheme is proposed and formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process to minimize the system cost, which consists of both network overhead and execution time of computing tasks. Extensive simulation results with different system parameters reveal that the proposed scheme could significantly improve the system performance compared to the existing schemes.