Air-Ground Collaborative Mobile Edge Computing:Architecture,Challenges,and Opportunities

By pushing computation,cache,and network control to the edge,mobile edge computing(MEC)is expected to play a leading role in fifth generation(5G)and future sixth generation(6G).Nevertheless,facing ubiquitous fast-growing computational demands,it is impossible for a single MEC paradigm to effectively support high-quality intelligent services at end user equipments(UEs).To address this issue,we propose an air-ground collaborative MEC(AGCMEC)architecture in this article.The proposed AGCMEC integrates all potentially available MEC servers within air and ground in the envisioned 6G,by a variety of collaborative ways to provide computation services at their best for UEs.Firstly,we introduce the AGC-MEC architecture and elaborate three typical use cases.Then,we discuss four main challenges in the AGC-MEC as well as their potential solutions.Next,we conduct a case study of collaborative service placement for AGC-MEC to validate the effectiveness of the proposed collaborative service placement strategy.Finally,we highlight several potential research directions of the AGC-MEC.

Joint Task Allocation and Resource Optimization for Blockchain Enabled Collaborative Edge Computing

Collaborative edge computing is a promising direction to handle the computation intensive tasks in B5G wireless networks.However,edge computing servers(ECSs)from different operators may not trust each other,and thus the incentives for collaboration cannot be guaranteed.In this paper,we propose a consortium blockchain enabled collaborative edge computing framework,where users can offload computing tasks to ECSs from different operators.To minimize the total delay of users,we formulate a joint task offloading and resource optimization problem,under the constraint of the computing capability of each ECS.We apply the Tammer decomposition method and heuristic optimization algorithms to obtain the optimal solution.Finally,we propose a reputation based node selection approach to facilitate the consensus process,and also consider a completion time based primary node selection to avoid monopolization of certain edge node and enhance the security of the blockchain.Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm,and the total delay can be reduced by up to 40%compared with the non-cooperative case.

Optimal edge-cloud collaboration based strategies for minimizing valid latency of railway environment monitoring system

Response speed is vital for the railway environment monitoring system,especially for the sudden-onset disasters.The edge-cloud collaboration scheme is proved efficient to reduce the latency.However,the data characteristics and communication demand of the tasks in the railway environment monitoring system are all different and changeable,and the latency contribution of each task to the system is discrepant.Hence,two valid latency minimization strategies based on the edge-cloud collaboration scheme is developed in this paper.First,the processing resources are allocated to the tasks based on the priorities,and the tasks are processed parallly with the allocated resources to minimize the system valid latency.Furthermore,considering the differences in the data volume of the tasks,which will induce the waste of the resources for the tasks finished in advance.Thus,the tasks with similar priorities are graded into the same group,and the serial and parallel processing strategies are performed intra-group and inter-group simultaneously.Compared with the other four strategies in four railway monitoring scenarios,the proposed strategies proved latency efficiency to the high-priority tasks,and the system valid latency is reduced synchronously.The performance of the railway environment monitoring system in security and efficiency will be promoted greatly with the proposed scheme and strategies.

Edge-Cloud Computing for Scheduling the Energy Consumption in Smart Grid

Nowadays,smart electricity grids are managed through advanced tools and techniques.The advent of Artificial Intelligence(AI)and network technology helps to control the energy demand.These advanced technologies can resolve common issues such as blackouts,optimal energy generation costs,and peakhours congestion.In this paper,the residential energy demand has been investigated and optimized to enhance the Quality of Service(QoS)to consumers.The energy consumption is distributed throughout the day to fulfill the demand in peak hours.Therefore,an Edge-Cloud computing-based model is proposed to schedule the energy demand with reward-based energy consumption.This model gives priority to consumer preferences while planning the operation of appliances.A distributed system using non-cooperative game theory has been designed to minimize the communication overhead between the edge nodes.Furthermore,the allotment mechanism has been designed to manage the grid appliances through the edge node.The proposed model helps to improve the latency in the grid appliances scheduling process.

Optimization and Design of Cloud-Edge-End Collaboration Computing for Autonomous Robot Control Using 5G and Beyond

Robots have important applications in industrial production, transportation, environmental monitoring and other fields, and multi-robot collaboration is a research hotspot in recent years. Multi-robot autonomous collaborative tasks are limited by communication, and there are problems such as poor resource allocation balance, slow response of the system to dynamic changes in the environment, and limited collaborative operation capabilities. The combination of 5G and beyond communication and edge computing can effectively reduce the transmission delay of task offloading and improve task processing efficiency. First, this paper designs a robot autonomous collaborative computing architecture based on 5G and beyond and mobile edge computing(MEC).Then, the robot cooperative computing optimization problem is studied according to the task characteristics of the robot swarm. Then, a reinforcement learning task offloading scheme based on Qlearning is further proposed, so that the overall energy consumption and delay of the robot cluster can be minimized. Finally, simulation experiments demonstrate that the method has significant performance advantages.

Intelligent Task Offloading and Collaborative Computation in Multi-UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing

This article establishes a three-tier mobile edge computing(MEC) network, which takes into account the cooperation between unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). In this MEC network, we aim to minimize the processing delay of tasks by jointly optimizing the deployment of UAVs and offloading decisions,while meeting the computing capacity constraint of UAVs. However, the resulting optimization problem is nonconvex, which cannot be solved by general optimization tools in an effective and efficient way. To this end, we propose a two-layer optimization algorithm to tackle the non-convexity of the problem by capitalizing on alternating optimization. In the upper level algorithm, we rely on differential evolution(DE) learning algorithm to solve the deployment of the UAVs. In the lower level algorithm, we exploit distributed deep neural network(DDNN) to generate offloading decisions. Numerical results demonstrate that the two-layer optimization algorithm can effectively obtain the near-optimal deployment of UAVs and offloading strategy with low complexity.

Satellite-Air-Terrestrial Cloud Edge Collaborative Networks:Architecture,Multi-Node Task Processing and Computation

Integrated satellite-terrestrial network(ISTN)has been considered a novel network architecture to achieve global three-dimensional coverage and ultra-wide area broadband access anytime and anywhere.Being a promising paradigm,cloud computing and mobile edge computing(MEC)have been identified as key technology enablers for ISTN to further improve quality of service and business continuity.However,most of the existing ISTN studies based on cloud computing and MEC regard satellite networks as relay networks,ignoring the feasibility of directly deploying cloud computing nodes and edge computing nodes on satellites.In addition,most computing tasks are transferred to cloud servers or offloaded to nearby edge servers,the layered design of integrated satellite-air-terrestrial architecture and the cloud-edge-device cooperative processing problems have not been fully considered.Therefore,different from previous works,this paper proposed a novel satellite-air-terrestrial layered architecture for cloud-edge-device collaboration,named SATCECN.Then this paper analyzes the appropriate deployment locations of cloud servers and edge servers in ISTN,and describes the processing flow of typical satellite computing tasks.For computing resource allocation problems,this paper proposed a device-edge-cloud Multi-node Cross-layer Collaboration Computing(MCCC)method to find the optimal task allo-cation strategy that minimizes the task completion delay and the weighted system energy consumption.Furthermore,the approximate optimal solutions of the optimization model are obtained by using successive convex approxi-mation algorithm,and the outstanding advantages of the proposed method in reducing system energy consumption and task execution delay are verified through experiments.Finally,some potential issues and directions for future research are highlighted.

Path Computing Scheme with Low-Latency and Low-Power in Hybrid Cloud-Fog Network for IIoT

With the rapid development of the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT),the traditional centralized cloud processing model has encountered the challenges of high communication latency and high energy consumption in handling industrial big data tasks.This paper aims to propose a low-latency and lowenergy path computing scheme for the above problems.This scheme is based on the cloud-fog network architecture.The computing resources of fog network devices in the fog computing layer are used to complete task processing step by step during the data interaction from industrial field devices to the cloud center.A collaborative scheduling strategy based on the particle diversity discrete binary particle swarm optimization(PDBPSO)algorithm is proposed to deploy manufacturing tasks to the fog computing layer reasonably.The task in the form of a directed acyclic graph(DAG)is mapped to a factory fog network in the form of an undirected graph(UG)to find the appropriate computing path for the task,significantly reducing the task processing latency under energy consumption constraints.Simulation experiments show that this scheme’s latency performance outperforms the strategy that tasks are wholly offloaded to the cloud and the strategy that tasks are entirely offloaded to the edge equipment.

Recommendation algorithm of cloud computing system based on random walk algorithm and collaborative filtering model

The traditional collaborative filtering recommendation technology has some shortcomings in the large data environment. To solve this problem, a personalized recommendation method based on cloud computing technology is proposed. The large data set and recommendation computation are decomposed into parallel processing on multiple computers. A parallel recommendation engine based on Hadoop open source framework is established, and the effectiveness of the system is validated by learning recommendation on an English training platform. The experimental results show that the scalability of the recommender system can be greatly improved by using cloud computing technology to handle massive data in the cluster. On the basis of the comparison of traditional recommendation algorithms, combined with the advantages of cloud computing, a personalized recommendation system based on cloud computing is proposed.

Demand-aware mobile bike-sharing service using collaborative computing and information fusion in 5G IoT environment

Mobile bike-sharing services have been prevalently used in many cities as an important urban commuting service and a promising way to build smart cities,especially in the new era of 5G and Internet-of-Things(IoT)environments.A mobile bike-sharing service makes commuting convenient for people and imparts new vitality to urban transportation systems.In the real world,the problems of no docks or no bikes at bike-sharing stations often arise because of several inevitable reasons such as the uncertainty of bike usage.In addition to pure manual rebalancing,in several works,attempts were made to predict the demand for bikes.In this paper,we devised a bike-sharing service with highly accurate demand prediction using collaborative computing and information fusion.We combined the information of bike demands at different time periods and the locations between stations and proposed a dynamical clustering algorithm for station clustering.We carefully analyzed and discovered the group of features that impact the demand of bikes,from historical bike-sharing records and 5G IoT environment data.We combined the discovered information and proposed an XGBoost-based regression model to predict the rental and return demand.We performed sufficient experiments on two real-world datasets.The results confirm that compared to some existing methods,our method produces superior prediction results and performance and improves the availability of bike-sharing service in 5G IoT environments.

Collaborative Design Theory and Related Key Technology Study Based on Cloud Computing

Analyzes the main way of product distribution for collaborative design. According to the requirement of manufacturing collaborative design, apply cloud computing in manufacturing collaborative design and come up the concept of product collaborative cloud design. Study the product collaborative design theory based on cloud computing and the general key technology of cloud computing, semantic web, intelligent matching selection algorithm, STEP and XML technology, version management and conflict resolution arithmetic and so on which related to this theory. The study object of this article is automotive product. Construct an automotive collaborative design system with the key technology to verify the feasibility and validity of the cloud basing collaborative design theory and related technology. This collaborative design system will overcome the weakness that resource and information can not be shared between different department in the same enterprise or different enterprises. Join up this system will help directly enterprise for collaborative design and the repetition construction of collaborative design platform of each enterprise will be avoid. It will reduce the investment of enterprises for constructing and managing collaborative design platform and further reduce the cost of product R&D with a better and more efficient design.

Multi-UAV Collaborative Edge Computing Algorithm for Joint Task Offloading and Channel Resource Allocation

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based edge computing is an emerging technology that provides fast task processing for a wider area. To address the issues of limited computation resource of a single UAV and finite communication resource in multi-UAV networks, this paper joints consideration of task offloading and wireless channel allocation on a collaborative multi-UAV computing network, where a high altitude platform station (HAPS)is adopted as the relay device for communication between UAV clusters consisting of UAV cluster heads (ch-UAVs) and mission UAVs (m-UAVs). We propose an algorithm, jointing task offloading and wireless channel allocation to maximize the average service success rate (ASSR)of a period time. In particular,the simulated annealing(SA)algorithm with random perturbations is used for optimal channel allocation,aiming to reduce interference and minimize transmission delay.A multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) is proposed to get the best task offloading strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SA algorithm in channel allocation. Meanwhile,when jointly considering computation and channel resources,the proposed scheme effectively enhances the ASSR in comparison to other benchmark algorithms.

Collaborative Clustering Parallel Reinforcement Learning for Edge-Cloud Digital Twins Manufacturing System

To realize high-accuracy physical-cyber digital twin(DT)mapping in a manufacturing system,a huge amount of data need to be collected and analyzed in real-time.Traditional DTs systems are deployed in cloud or edge servers independently,whilst it is hard to apply in real production systems due to the high interaction or execution delay.This results in a low consistency in the temporal dimension of the physical-cyber model.In this work,we propose a novel efficient edge-cloud DT manufacturing system,which is inspired by resource scheduling technology.Specifically,an edge-cloud collaborative DTs system deployment architecture is first constructed.Then,deterministic and uncertainty optimization adaptive strategies are presented to choose a more powerful server for running DT-based applications.We model the adaptive optimization problems as dynamic programming problems and propose a novel collaborative clustering parallel Q-learning(CCPQL)algorithm and prediction-based CCPQL to solve the problems.The proposed approach reduces the total delay with a higher convergence rate.Numerical simulation results are provided to validate the approach,which would have great potential in dynamic and complex industrial internet environments.

Prototyping and Evaluating a Wearable System for Mobile Distributed Collaboration

We have developed a wearable system for mobile distributed collaboration called HandsInAir using emerging wireless and mobile technologies. This system was developed to support real world scenarios in which a remote mobile helper guides a local mobile worker in the completion of a physical task. HandsInAir consists of a helper unit and a worker unit. Both units are equipped with wearable devices having the same hardware configuration, but running different pieces of software to support the distinct roles of the collaborators (helper and worker). The two sides are connected via a wireless network and the collaboration partners can communicate with each other via audio and visual links. In this paper we describe the technical implementation of the system and present a preliminary evaluation of it. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of possible future work for further improvements and new developments.

Centralization and collaboration in 5G ultra-dense network architecture

An ultra-dense network scenario is a scene where a large number of people assemble in a limited area to generate centralized broadband data traffic requirements.Because ultra-dense networks generate enormous traffic pressure,traditional network capabilities are not enough to accommodate the user s needs.Based on the description of ultra-dense network architecture,we analyze millimeter wave radio spectrum,high gain beam forming,physical layer frame structure,resource concentration and edge computing technology.In addition,the cooperative technology required by overlay and interference symbiosis in the dense network architecture as well as the access control technology of centralized access is analyzed and discussed comprehensively.

Edge-Cloud Collaborative Optimization Scheduling with Micro-Service Architecture

The architecture of edge-cloud cooperation is proposed as a compromising solution that combines the advantage of MEC and central cloud. In this paper we investigated the problem of how to reduce the average delay of MEC application by collaborative task scheduling. The collaborative task scheduling is modeled as a constrained shortest path problem over an acyclic graph. By characterizing the optimal solution, the constrained optimization problem is simplified according to one-climb theory and enumeration algorithm. Generally, the edge-cloud collaborative task scheduling scheme performance better than independent scheme in reducing average delay. In heavy workload scenario, high blocking probability and retransmission delay at MEC is the key factor for average delay. Hence, more task executed on central cloud with abundant resource is the optimal scheme. Otherwise, transmission delay is inevitable compared with execution delay. MEC configured with higher priority and deployed close to terminals obtain more performance gain.

Illegal Access Detection in the Cloud Computing Environment

In this paper detection method for the illegal access to the cloud infrastructure is proposed. Detection process is based on the collaborative filtering algorithm constructed on the cloud model. Here, first of all, the normal behavior of the user is formed in the shape of a cloud model, then these models are compared with each other by using the cosine similarity method and by applying the collaborative filtering method the deviations from the normal behavior are evaluated. If the deviation value is above than the threshold, the user who gained access to the system is evaluated as illegal, otherwise he is evaluated as a real user.

A Work Service Model of the Ubiquitous Environment Collaboration

Office environments have recently adopted ubiquitous computing for collaboration and mobile communication to promote real-time enterprises. Ubiquitous offices, introduced by Weiser and adopted as emerging computational technology to support office works, have already affected the practice of companies and organizations. Within this context, this study deals with a work service model of the ubiquitous office environments by understanding human behaviors and works in their workspace. We propose a ubiquitous office model considering the correlation between ubiquitous computing technologies and work services in the office. Two attributes are emphasized, collaboration and mobility, as identifiers for categorizing the work types. The types of work services have variations in the amount of communication and the proportion of working outside of the office. The proposed work service model of the ubiquitous office includes territorial and non-territorial services to enable workers in and out of the office to interact with each other effectively. The findings in this paper would be a theoretical basis for embodying an intelligent office which supports office works efficiently.

An Empirical Study of the Optimum Team Size Requirement in a Collaborative Computer Programming/Learning Environment

Pair programming has been widely acclaimed the best way to go in computer programming. Recently, collaboration involving more subjects has been shown to produce better results in programming environments. However, the optimum group size needed for the collaboration has not been adequately addressed. This paper seeks to inculcate and acquaint the students involved in the study with the spirit of team work in software projects and to empirically determine the effective (optimum) team size that may be desirable in programming/learning real life environments. Two different experiments were organized and conducted. Parameters for determining the optimal team size were formulated. Volunteered participants of different genders were randomly grouped into five parallel teams of different sizes ranging from 1 to 5 in the first experiment. Each team size was replicated six times. The second experiment involved teams of same gender compositions (males or females) in different sizes. The times (efforts) for problem analysis and coding as well as compile-time errors (bugs) were recorded for each team size. The effectiveness was finally analyzed for the teams. The study shows that collaboration is highly beneficial to new learners of computer programming. They easily grasp the programming concepts when the learning is done in the company of others. The study also demonstrates that the optimum team size that may be adopted in a collaborative learning of computer programming is four.

A Reverse Auction Mechanism for Time-Varying Multidimensional Resource Allocation in Vehicular Fog Computing with Cloud and Edge Collaboration

It is a hot issue to allocate resources using auction mechanisms in vehicular fog computing(VFC)with cloud and edge collaboration.However,most current research faces the limitation of only considering single type resource allocation,which cannot satisfy the resource requirements of users.In addition,the resource requirements of users are satisfied with a fixed amount of resources during the usage time,which may result in high cost of users and even cause a waste of resources.In fact,the actual resource requirements of users may change with time.Besides,existing allocation algorithms in the VFC of cloud and edge collaboration cannot be directly applied to time-varying multidimensional resource allocation.Therefore,in order to minimize the cost of users,we propose a reverse auction mechanism for the time-varying multidimensional resource allocation problem(TMRAP)in VFC with cloud and edge collaboration based on VFC parking assistance and transform the resource allocation problem into an integer programming(IP)model.And we also design a heuristic resource allocation algorithm to approximate the solution of the model.We apply a dominant-resource-based strategy for resource allocation to improve resource utilization and obtain the lowest cost of users for resource pricing.Furthermore,we prove that the algorithm satisfies individual rationality and truthfulness,and can minimize the cost of users and improve resource utilization through comparison with other similar methods.Above all,we combine VFC smart parking assistance with reverse auction mechanisms to encourage resource providers to offer resources,so that more vehicle users can obtain services at lower prices and relieve traffic pressure.