Distributed cooperative task planning algorithm for multiple satellites in delayed communication environment

Multiple earth observing satellites need to communicate with each other to observe plenty of targets on the Earth together. The factors, such as external interference, result in satellite information interaction delays, which is unable to ensure the integrity and timeliness of the information on decision making for satellites. And the optimization of the planning result is affected. Therefore, the effect of communication delay is considered during the multi-satel ite coordinating process. For this problem, firstly, a distributed cooperative optimization problem for multiple satellites in the delayed communication environment is formulized. Secondly, based on both the analysis of the temporal sequence of tasks in a single satellite and the dynamically decoupled characteristics of the multi-satellite system, the environment information of multi-satellite distributed cooperative optimization is constructed on the basis of the directed acyclic graph（DAG）. Then, both a cooperative optimization decision making framework and a model are built according to the decentralized partial observable Markov decision process（DEC-POMDP）. After that, a satellite coordinating strategy aimed at different conditions of communication delay is mainly analyzed, and a unified processing strategy on communication delay is designed. An approximate cooperative optimization algorithm based on simulated annealing is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the method presented in this paper are verified via the simulation.

Employing Two ‘Sandwich Delay’ Mechanisms to Enhance Predictability of Embedded Systems Which Use Time-Triggered Co-Operative Architectures

In many real-time resource-constrained embedded systems, highly-predictable system behavior is a key design requirement. The “time-triggered co-operative” (TTC) scheduling algorithm provides a good match for a wide range of low-cost embedded applications. As a consequence of the resource, timing, and power constraints, the implementation of such algorithm is often far from trivial. Thus, basic implementation of TTC algorithm can result in excessive levels of task jitter which may jeopardize the predictability of many time-critical applications using this algorithm. This paper discusses the main sources of jitter in earlier TTC implementations and develops two alternative implementations – based on the employment of “sandwich delay” (SD) mechanisms – to reduce task jitter in TTC system significantly. In addition to jitter levels at task release times, we also assess the CPU, memory and power requirements involved in practical implementations of the proposed schedulers. The paper concludes that the TTC scheduler implementation using “multiple timer interrupt” (MTI) technique achieves better performance in terms of timing behavior and resource utilization as opposed to the other implementation which is based on a simple SD mechanism. Use of MTI technique is also found to provide a simple solution to “task overrun” problem which may degrade the performance of many TTC systems.

A New Partial Task Offloading Method in a Cooperation Mode under Multi-Constraints for Multi-UE

In Multi-access Edge Computing(MEC),to deal with multiple user equipment(UE)’s task offloading problem of parallel relationships under the multi-constraints,this paper proposes a cooperation partial task offloading method(named CPMM),aiming to reduce UE’s energy and computation consumption,while meeting the task completion delay as much as possible.CPMM first studies the task offloading of single-UE and then considers the task offloading ofmulti-UE based on single-UE task offloading.CPMMuses the critical path algorithmto divide the modules into key and non-key modules.According to some constraints of UE-self when offloading tasks,it gives priority to non-key modules for offloading and uses the evaluation decision method to select some appropriate key modules for offloading.Based on fully considering the competition between multiple UEs for communication resources and MEC service resources,CPMM uses the weighted queuing method to alleviate the competition for communication resources and uses the branch decision algorithm to determine the location of module offloading by BS according to the MEC servers’resources.It achieves its goal by selecting reasonable modules to offload and using the cooperation ofUE,MEC,andCloudCenter to determine the execution location of themodules.Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPMM obtains superior performances in task computation consumption reducing around 6%on average,task completion delay reducing around 5%on average,and better task execution success rate than other similar methods.

A Heuristic Method for Two-sided Assembly Line Balancing Problem

A two-sided assembly line is typically found in plants producing large-sized products. Its advantages over a one-sided line and the difficulties faced in two-sided line balancing problems were discussed. A mathematical model for two-ALB problem was suggested. A modification of the “ranked positional weight” method, namely two-ALB RPW for two-ALB problems was developed. Experiments were carried out to verify the performance of the proposed method and the results show that it is effective in solving two-sided assembly line balancing problems.

Modelling Mobile-X Architecture for Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)assists clouds to handle enormous tasks from mobile devices in close proximity.The edge servers are not allocated efficiently according to the dynamic nature of the network.It leads to processing delay,and the tasks are dropped due to time limitations.The researchersfind it difficult and complex to determine the offloading decision because of uncertain load dynamic condition over the edge nodes.The challenge relies on the offload-ing decision on selection of edge nodes for offloading in a centralized manner.This study focuses on minimizing task-processing time while simultaneously increasing the success rate of service provided by edge servers.Initially,a task-offloading problem needs to be formulated based on the communication and pro-cessing.Then offloading decision problem is solved by deep analysis on taskflow in the network and feedback from the devices on edge services.The significance of the model is improved with the modelling of Deep Mobile-X architecture and bi-directional Long Short Term Memory(b-LSTM).The simulation is done in the Edgecloudsim environment,and the outcomes show the significance of the proposed idea.The processing time of the anticipated model is 6.6 s.The following perfor-mance metrics,improved server utilization,the ratio of the dropped task,and number of offloading tasks are evaluated and compared with existing learning approaches.The proposed model shows a better trade-off compared to existing approaches.

Service Caching and Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Intelligent Connected Vehicles

The development of intelligent connected vehicles(ICVs)has tremendously inspired the emergence of a new computing paradigm called mobile edge computing(MEC),which meets the demands of delay-sensitive on-vehicle applications.Most existing studies focusing on the issue of task offloading in ICVs assume that the MEC server can directly complete computation tasks without considering the necessity of service caching.However,this is unrealistic in practice because a large number of tasks require the use of corresponding third-party libraries and databases,that is,service caching.Therefore,we investigate the delay optimization in an MEC-enabled ICVs system with multiple mobile vehicles,resource-limited base stations(BSs),and one cloud server.We aim to determine the optimal service caching and task offloading decisions to minimize the overall system delay using mixed-integer nonlinear programming.To address this problem,we first convert it into a quadratically constrained quadratic program and then propose an efficient semidefinite relaxation-based joint service caching and task offloading(JSCTO)algorithm to obtain the service caching and task offloading decisions.In the simulations,we validate the efficiency of our proposed method by setting different numbers of vehicles and the storage capacity of BSs.The results show that our proposed JSCTO algorithm can significantly decrease the total delay of all offloaded tasks compared with the cloud processing only scheme.

Reducing the Upper Bound Delay by Optimizing Bank-to-Core Mapping

Nowadays, inter-task interferences are the main difficulty in analyzing the timing behavior of multicores. The timing predictable embedded multicore architecture MERASA, which allows safe worst-case execution time （WCET） estimations, has emerged as an attractive solution. In the architecture, WCET can be estimated by the upper bound delay （UBD） which can be bounded by the interference-aware bus arbiter （IABA） and the dynamic cache partitioning such as columnization or bankization. However, this architecture faces a dilemma between decreasing UBD and efficient shared cache utilization. To obtain tighter WCET estimation, we propose a novel approach that reduces UBD by optimizing bank-to-core mapping on the multicore system with IABA and the two-level partitioned cache. For this, we first present a new UBD computation model based on the analysis of inter-task interference delay, and then put forward the core-sequence optimization method of bank-to-core mapping and the optimizing algorithms with the minimum UBD. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can reduce WCET from 4% to 37%.