The explosive amount of data generated at the network edge makes mobile edge computing an essential technology to support real-time applications, calling for powerful data processing and analysis provided by machine learning (ML) techniques. In particular, federated edge learning (FEL) becomes prominent in securing the privacy of data owners by keeping the data locally used to train ML models. Existing studies on FEL either utilize in-process optimization or remove unqualified participants in advance. In this paper, we enhance the collaboration from all edge devices in FEL to guarantee that the ML model is trained using all available local data to accelerate the learning process. To that aim, we propose a collective extortion (CE) strategy under the imperfect-information multi-player FEL game, which is proved to be effective in helping the server efficiently elicit the full contribution of all devices without worrying about suffering from any economic loss. Technically, our proposed CE strategy extends the classical extortion strategy in controlling the proportionate share of expected utilities for a single opponent to the swiftly homogeneous control over a group of players, which further presents an attractive trait of being impartial for all participants. Moreover, the CE strategy enriches the game theory hierarchy, facilitating a wider application scope of the extortion strategy. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations validate the effectiveness and fairness of our proposed scheme.
The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global health crisis. Public spaces need to be safeguarded from the adverse effects of this pandemic. Wearing a facemask becomes one of the effective protection solutions adopted by many governments. Manual real-time monitoring of facemask wearing for a large group of people is becoming a difficult task. The goal of this paper is to use deep learning (DL), which has shown excellent results in many real-life applications, to ensure efficient real-time facemask detection. The proposed approach is based on two steps. An off-line step aiming to create a DL model that is able to detect and locate facemasks and whether they are appropriately worn. An online step that deploys the DL model at edge computing in order to detect masks in real-time. In this study, we propose to use MobileNetV2 to detect facemask in real-time. Several experiments are conducted and show good performances of the proposed approach (99% for training and testing accuracy). In addition, several comparisons with many state-of-the-art models namely ResNet50, DenseNet, and VGG16 show good performance of the MobileNetV2 in terms of training time and accuracy.
Federated Learning (FL) over wireless multi-hop edge computing networks, i.e., multi-hop FL, is a cost-effective distributed on-device deep learning paradigm. This paper presents FedEdge simulator, a high-fidelity Linux-based simulator, which enables fast prototyping, sim-to-real code, and knowledge transfer for multi-hop FL systems. FedEdge simulator is built on top of the hardware-oriented FedEdge experimental framework with a new extension of the realistic physical layer emulator. This emulator exploits trace-based channel modeling and dynamic link scheduling to minimize the reality gap between the simulator and the physical testbed. Our initial experiments demonstrate the high fidelity of the FedEdge simulator and its superior performance on sim-to-real knowledge transfer in reinforcement learning-optimized multi-hop FL.
In recent years, transformer models have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and shown promising performance on Computer Vision (CV) tasks. Despite their effectiveness, transformers' attention operations are hard to accelerate due to the complicated data movement and quadratic computational complexity, prohibiting the real-time inference on resource-constrained edge-computing platforms. To tackle this challenge, we propose Energon, an algorithm-architecture co-design approach that accelerates various transformers using dynamic sparse attention. With the observation that attention results only depend on a few important query-key pairs, we propose a Mix-Precision Multi-Round Filtering (MP-MRF) algorithm to dynamically identify such pairs at runtime. We adopt low bitwidth in each filtering round and only use high-precision tensors in the attention stage to reduce overall complexity. By this means, we significantly mitigate the computational cost with negligible accuracy loss. To enable such an algorithm with lower latency and better energy efficiency, we also propose an Energon co-processor architecture. Elaborated pipelines and specialized optimizations jointly boost the performance and reduce power consumption. Extensive experiments on both NLP and CV benchmarks demonstrate that Energon achieves $168\times$ and $8.7\times$ geo-mean speedup and up to $10^4\times$ and $10^3\times$ energy reduction compared with Intel Xeon 5220 CPU and NVIDIA V100 GPU. Compared to state-of-the-art attention accelerators SpAtten and $A^3$, Energon also achieves $1.7\times, 1.25\times$ speedup and $1.6 \times, 1.5\times $ higher energy efficiency.
High energy solar flares and coronal mass ejections have the potential to destroy Earth's ground and satellite infrastructures, causing trillions of dollars in damage and mass human suffering. Destruction of these critical systems would disable power grids and satellites, crippling communications and transportation. This would lead to food shortages and an inability to respond to emergencies. A solution to this impending problem is proposed herein using satellites in solar orbit that continuously monitor the Sun, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to calculate the probability of massive solar explosions from this sensed data, and then signal defense mechanisms that will mitigate the threat. With modern technology there may be only safeguards that can be implemented with enough warning, which is why the best algorithm must be identified and continuously trained with existing and new data to maximize true positive rates while minimizing false negatives. This paper conducts a survey of current machine learning models using open source solar flare prediction data. The rise of edge computing allows machine learning hardware to be placed on the same satellites as the sensor arrays, saving critical time by not having to transmit remote sensing data across the vast distances of space. A system of systems approach will allow enough warning for safety measures to be put into place mitigating the risk of disaster.
Matrix multiplication is the bedrock in Deep Learning inference application. When it comes to hardware acceleration on edge computing devices, matrix multiplication often takes up a great majority of the time. To achieve better performance in edge computing, we introduce a low-power Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) accelerator based on a pipelined matrix multiplication scheme and a nonuniform quantization methodology. The implementation is running on Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices and tested its performance on handwritten digit classification and Q-learning tasks. Results show that our method can achieve better performance with fewer power consumption.
The improvements in the edge computing technology pave the road for diversified applications that demand real-time interaction. However, due to the mobility of the end-users and the dynamic edge environment, it becomes challenging to handle the task offloading with high performance. Moreover, since each application in mobile devices has different characteristics, a task orchestrator must be adaptive and have the ability to learn the dynamics of the environment. For this purpose, we develop a deep reinforcement learning based task orchestrator, DeepEdge, which learns to meet different task requirements without needing human interaction even under the heavily-loaded stochastic network conditions in terms of mobile users and applications. Given the dynamic offloading requests and time-varying communication conditions, we successfully model the problem as a Markov process and then apply the Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) algorithm to implement DeepEdge. To evaluate the robustness of DeepEdge, we experiment with four different applications including image rendering, infotainment, pervasive health, and augmented reality in the network under various loads. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our agent with the four different task offloading approaches in the literature. Our results show that DeepEdge outperforms its competitors in terms of the percentage of satisfactorily completed tasks.
An Intelligent IoT Environment (iIoTe) is comprised of heterogeneous devices that can collaboratively execute semi-autonomous IoT applications, examples of which include highly automated manufacturing cells or autonomously interacting harvesting machines. Energy efficiency is key in such edge environments, since they are often based on an infrastructure that consists of wireless and battery-run devices, e.g., e-tractors, drones, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV)s and robots. The total energy consumption draws contributions from multipleiIoTe technologies that enable edge computing and communication, distributed learning, as well as distributed ledgers and smart contracts. This paper provides a state-of-the-art overview of these technologies and illustrates their functionality and performance, with special attention to the tradeoff among resources, latency, privacy and energy consumption. Finally, the paper provides a vision for integrating these enabling technologies in energy-efficient iIoTe and a roadmap to address the open research challenges
Advances in edge computing are powering the development and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems to provide advanced services and resource efficiency. However, large-scale IoT-based load-altering attacks (LAAs) can seriously impact power grid operations, such as destabilising the grid's control loops. Timely detection and identification of any compromised nodes are essential to minimise the adverse effects of these attacks on power grid operations. In this work, two data-driven algorithms are proposed to detect and identify compromised nodes and the attack parameters of the LAAs. The first method, based on the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) approach, adopts a sparse regression framework to identify attack parameters that best describe the observed dynamics. The second method, based on physics-informed neural networks (PINN), employs neural networks to infer the attack parameters from the measurements. Both algorithms are presented utilising edge computing for deployment over decentralised architectures. Extensive simulations are performed on IEEE 6-,14- and 39-bus systems to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Numerical results confirm that the proposed algorithms outperform existing approaches, such as those based on unscented Kalman filter, support vector machines (SVM), and neural networks (NN), and effectively detect and identify locations of attack in a timely manner.
Edge computing devices inherently face tight resource constraints, which is especially apparent when deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNN) with high memory and compute demands. FPGAs are commonly available in edge devices. Since these reconfigurable circuits can achieve higher throughput and lower power consumption than general purpose processors, they are especially well-suited for DNN acceleration. However, existing solutions for designing FPGA-based DNN accelerators for edge devices come with high development overheads, given the cost of repeated FPGA synthesis passes, reimplementation in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) of the simulated design, and accelerator system integration. In this paper we propose SECDA, a new hardware/software co-design methodology to reduce design time of optimized DNN inference accelerators on edge devices with FPGAs. SECDA combines cost-effective SystemC simulation with hardware execution, streamlining design space exploration and the development process via reduced design evaluation time. As a case study, we use SECDA to efficiently develop two different DNN accelerator designs on a PYNQ-Z1 board, a platform that includes an edge FPGA. We quickly and iteratively explore the system's hardware/software stack, while identifying and mitigating performance bottlenecks. We evaluate the two accelerator designs with four common DNN models, achieving an average performance speedup across models of up to 3.5$\times$ with a 2.9$\times$ reduction in energy consumption over CPU-only inference. Our code is available at https://github.com/gicLAB/SECDA
The healthcare industry has witnessed significant transformations in e-health services by using mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain to facilitate healthcare operations. Many MEC-blockchain-based schemes have been proposed, but some critical technical challenges still remain, such as low quality of services (QoS), data privacy and system security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized health architecture, called BEdgeHealth that integrates MEC and blockchain for data offloading and data sharing in distributed hospital networks. First, a data offloading scheme is proposed where mobile devices can offload health data to a nearby MEC server for efficient computation with privacy awareness. Moreover, we design a data sharing scheme which enables data exchanges among healthcare users by leveraging blockchain and interplanetary file system. Particularly, a smart contract-based authentication mechanism is integrated with MEC to perform decentralized user access verification at the network edge without requiring any central authority. The real-world experiment results and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BEdgeHealth architecture in terms of improved QoS with data privacy and security guarantees, compared to the existing schemes.
The convergence of mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain is transforming the current computing services in mobile networks, by offering task offloading solutions with security enhancement empowered by blockchain mining. Nevertheless, these important enabling technologies have been studied separately in most existing works. This article proposes a novel cooperative task offloading and block mining (TOBM) scheme for a blockchain-based MEC system where each edge device not only handles data tasks but also deals with block mining for improving the system utility. To address the latency issues caused by the blockchain operation in MEC, we develop a new Proof-of-Reputation consensus mechanism based on a lightweight block verification strategy. A multi-objective function is then formulated to maximize the system utility of the blockchain-based MEC system, by jointly optimizing offloading decision, channel selection, transmit power allocation, and computational resource allocation. We propose a novel distributed deep reinforcement learning-based approach by using a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm. We then develop a game-theoretic solution to model the offloading and mining competition among edge devices as a potential game, and prove the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium. Simulation results demonstrate the significant system utility improvements of our proposed scheme over baseline approaches.
Emerging edge computing platforms often contain machine learning (ML) accelerators that can accelerate inference for a wide range of neural network (NN) models. These models are designed to fit within the limited area and energy constraints of the edge computing platforms, each targeting various applications (e.g., face detection, speech recognition, translation, image captioning, video analytics). To understand how edge ML accelerators perform, we characterize the performance of a commercial Google Edge TPU, using 24 Google edge NN models (which span a wide range of NN model types) and analyzing each NN layer within each model. We find that the Edge TPU suffers from three major shortcomings: (1) it operates significantly below peak computational throughput, (2) it operates significantly below its theoretical energy efficiency, and (3) its memory system is a large energy and performance bottleneck. Our characterization reveals that the one-size-fits-all, monolithic design of the Edge TPU ignores the high degree of heterogeneity both across different NN models and across different NN layers within the same NN model, leading to the shortcomings we observe. We propose a new acceleration framework called Mensa. Mensa incorporates multiple heterogeneous edge ML accelerators (including both on-chip and near-data accelerators), each of which caters to the characteristics of a particular subset of NN models and layers. During NN inference, for each NN layer, Mensa decides which accelerator to schedule the layer on, taking into account both the optimality of each accelerator for the layer and layer-to-layer communication costs. Averaged across all 24 Google edge NN models, Mensa improves energy efficiency and throughput by 3.0x and 3.1x over the Edge TPU, and by 2.4x and 4.3x over Eyeriss~v2, a state-of-the-art accelerator.
Drones are currently being explored for safety-critical applications where human agents are expected to evolve in their vicinity. In such applications, robust people avoidance must be provided by fusing a number of sensing modalities in order to avoid collisions. Currently however, people detection systems used on drones are solely based on standard cameras besides an emerging number of works discussing the fusion of imaging and event-based cameras. On the other hand, radar-based systems provide up-most robustness towards environmental conditions but do not provide complete information on their own and have mainly been investigated in automotive contexts, not for drones. In order to enable the fusion of radars with both event-based and standard cameras, we present KUL-UAVSAFE, a first-of-its-kind dataset for the study of safety-critical people detection by drones. In addition, we propose a baseline CNN architecture with cross-fusion highways and introduce a curriculum learning strategy for multi-modal data termed SAUL, which greatly enhances the robustness of the system towards hard RGB failures and provides a significant gain of 15% in peak F1 score compared to the use of BlackIn, previously proposed for cross-fusion networks. We demonstrate the real-time performance and feasibility of the approach by implementing the system in an edge-computing unit. We release our dataset and additional material in the project home page.
Recently, the boosting growth of computation-heavy applications raises great challenges for the Fifth Generation (5G) and future wireless networks. As responding, the hybrid edge and cloud computing (ECC) system has been expected as a promising solution to handle the increasing computational applications with low-latency and on-demand services of computation offloading, which requires new computing resource sharing and access control technology paradigms. This work establishes a software-defined networking (SDN) based architecture for edge/cloud computing services in 5G heterogeneous networks (HetNets), which can support efficient and on-demand computing resource management to optimize resource utilization and satisfy the time-varying computational tasks uploaded by user devices. In addition, resulting from the information incompleteness, we design an evolutionary game based service selection for users, which can model the replicator dynamics of service subscription. Based on this dynamic access model, a Stackelberg differential game based cloud computing resource sharing mechanism is proposed to facilitate the resource trading between the cloud computing service provider (CCP) and different edge computing service providers (ECPs). Then we derive the optimal pricing and allocation strategies of cloud computing resource based on the replicator dynamics of users' service selection. These strategies can promise the maximum integral utilities to all computing service providers (CPs), meanwhile the user distribution can reach the evolutionary stable state at this Stackelberg equilibrium. Furthermore, simulation results validate the performance of the designed resource sharing mechanism, and reveal the convergence and equilibrium states of user selection, and computing resource pricing and allocation.
This paper considers a multi-process and multi-controller wireless networked control system (WNCS). There are $N$ independent linear time-invariant processes in the system plant which represent different kinds of physical processes. By considering the edge computing, the controllers are played by edge server and cloud server. Each process is measured by a sensor, and the status updates is sent to controller to generate the control command. The link delay of cloud server is longer than that of edge server. The processing time of status update depends on the characteristic of servers and processes. By taking into account such conditions, we mainly investigate how to choose the destination of status updates to minimize the system's average Mean Square Error (MSE), edge server or cloud server? To address this issue, we formulate an infinite horizon average cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and obtain the optimal scheduling policy. The monotonicity of the value function in MDP is characterized and then used to show the threshold structure properties of the optimal scheduling policy. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose a low-complexity suboptimal policy by using additive separable structure of value function. Furthermore, the processing preemption mechanism is considered to handle the status updates more flexible, and the consistency property is proved. On this basis, a numerical example is provided. The simulation results illustrate that the controller selection is related to the timeliness of process and show the performance of the suboptimal policy. We also find that the optimal policy will become a static policy in which the destination of status update is fixed when the wireless channel is error free.
in healthcare. However, the existing AI model may be biased in its decision marking. The bias induced by data itself, such as collecting data in subgroups only, can be mitigated by including more diversified data. Distributed and collaborative learning is an approach to involve training models in massive, heterogeneous, and distributed data sources, also known as nodes. In this work, we target on examining the fairness issue in Swarm Learning (SL), a recent edge-computing based decentralized machine learning approach, which is designed for heterogeneous illnesses detection in precision medicine. SL has achieved high performance in clinical applications, but no attempt has been made to evaluate if SL can improve fairness. To address the problem, we present an empirical study by comparing the fairness among single (node) training, SL, centralized training. Specifically, we evaluate on large public available skin lesion dataset, which contains samples from various subgroups. The experiments demonstrate that SL does not exacerbate the fairness problem compared to centralized training and improves both performance and fairness compared to single training. However, there still exists biases in SL model and the implementation of SL is more complex than the alternative two strategies.
Energy-efficient design is of crucial importance in wireless internet of things (IoT) networks. In order to serve massive users while achieving an energy-efficient operation, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) network with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is studied in this paper. The energy efficiency (EE) is maximized by jointly optimizing the offloading power, local computing frequency, receiving beamforming, and IRS phase-shift matrix. The problem is challenging to solve due to the non-convex fractional objective functions and the coupling among the variables. A semidefinite programming relaxation (SDR) based alternating algorithm is developed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design outperforms the benchmark schemes in terms of EE. Applying IRS and NOMA can effectively improve the performance of the MEC network.
Signal capture stands in the forefront to perceive and understand the environment and thus imaging plays the pivotal role in mobile vision. Recent explosive progresses in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have shown great potential to develop advanced mobile platforms with new imaging devices. Traditional imaging systems based on the "capturing images first and processing afterwards" mechanism cannot meet this unprecedented demand. Differently, Computational Imaging (CI) systems are designed to capture high-dimensional data in an encoded manner to provide more information for mobile vision systems.Thanks to AI, CI can now be used in real systems by integrating deep learning algorithms into the mobile vision platform to achieve the closed loop of intelligent acquisition, processing and decision making, thus leading to the next revolution of mobile vision.Starting from the history of mobile vision using digital cameras, this work first introduces the advances of CI in diverse applications and then conducts a comprehensive review of current research topics combining CI and AI. Motivated by the fact that most existing studies only loosely connect CI and AI (usually using AI to improve the performance of CI and only limited works have deeply connected them), in this work, we propose a framework to deeply integrate CI and AI by using the example of self-driving vehicles with high-speed communication, edge computing and traffic planning. Finally, we outlook the future of CI plus AI by investigating new materials, brain science and new computing techniques to shed light on new directions of mobile vision systems.
The deployment of artificial neural networks-based optical channel equalizers on edge-computing devices is critically important for the next generation of optical communication systems. However, this is still a highly challenging problem, mainly due to the computational complexity of the artificial neural networks (NNs) required for the efficient equalization of nonlinear optical channels with large dispersion-induced memory. To implement the NN-based optical channel equalizer in hardware, a substantial complexity reduction is needed, while we have to keep an acceptable performance level of the simplified NN model. In this work, we address the complexity reduction problem by applying pruning and quantization techniques to an NN-based optical channel equalizer. We use an exemplary NN architecture, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), to mitigate the impairments for 30GBd 1000km transmission over a standard single-mode fiber, and demonstrate that it is feasible to reduce the equalizer's memory by up to 87.12%, and its complexity by up to 78.34%, without noticeable performance degradation. In addition to this, we accurately define the computational complexity of a compressed NN-based equalizer in the digital signal processing (DSP) sense. Further, we examine the impact of using different CPU and GPU settings on the power consumption and latency for the compressed equalizer. We also verify the developed technique experimentally, by implementing the reduced NN equalizer on two standard edge-computing hardware units: Raspberry Pi 4 and Nvidia Jetson Nano, which are used to process the data generated via simulating the signal's propagation down the optical-fiber system.