Federated analytics has many applications in edge computing, its use can lead to better decision making for service provision, product development, and user experience. We propose a Bayesian approach to trend detection in which the probability of a keyword being trendy, given a dataset, is computed via Bayes' Theorem; the probability of a dataset, given that a keyword is trendy, is computed through secure aggregation of such conditional probabilities over local datasets of users. We propose a protocol, named SAFE, for Bayesian federated analytics that offers sufficient privacy for production grade use cases and reduces the computational burden of users and an aggregator. We illustrate this approach with a trend detection experiment and discuss how this approach could be extended further to make it production-ready.
Edge computing enabled smart greenhouse is a representative application of Internet of Things technology, which can monitor the environmental information in real time and employ the information to contribute to intelligent decision-making. In the process, anomaly detection for wireless sensor data plays an important role. However, traditional anomaly detection algorithms originally designed for anomaly detection in static data have not properly considered the inherent characteristics of data stream produced by wireless sensor such as infiniteness, correlations and concept drift, which may pose a considerable challenge on anomaly detection based on data stream, and lead to low detection accuracy and efficiency. First, data stream usually generates quickly which means that it is infinite and enormous, so any traditional off-line anomaly detection algorithm that attempts to store the whole dataset or to scan the dataset multiple times for anomaly detection will run out of memory space. Second, there exist correlations among different data streams, which traditional algorithms hardly consider. Third, the underlying data generation process or data distribution may change over time. Thus, traditional anomaly detection algorithms with no model update will lose their effects. Considering these issues, a novel method (called DLSHiForest) on basis of Locality-Sensitive Hashing and time window technique in this paper is proposed to solve these problems while achieving accurate and efficient detection. Comprehensive experiments are executed using real-world agricultural greenhouse dataset to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Experimental results show that our proposal is practicable in addressing challenges of traditional anomaly detection while ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
The quality of experience (QoE) requirements of wireless Virtual Reality (VR) can only be satisfied with high data rate, high reliability, and low VR interaction latency. This high data rate over short transmission distances may be achieved via abundant bandwidth in the terahertz (THz) band. However, THz waves suffer from severe signal attenuation, which may be compensated by the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology with programmable reflecting elements. Meanwhile, the low VR interaction latency may be achieved with the mobile edge computing (MEC) network architecture due to its high computation capability. Motivated by these considerations, in this paper, we propose a MEC-enabled and RIS-assisted THz VR network in an indoor scenario, by taking into account the uplink viewpoint prediction and position transmission, MEC rendering, and downlink transmission. We propose two methods, which are referred to as centralized online Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and distributed Federated Averaging (FedAvg), to predict the viewpoints of VR users. In the uplink, an algorithm that integrates online Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is deployed to predict the locations and the line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight statuses of the VR users over time. In the downlink, we further develop a constrained deep reinforcement learning algorithm to select the optimal phase shifts of the RIS under latency constraints. Simulation results show that our proposed learning architecture achieves near-optimal QoE as that of the genie-aided benchmark algorithm, and about two times improvement in QoE compared to the random phase shift selection scheme.
With recent advances, neural networks have become a crucial building block in intelligent IoT systems and sensing applications. However, the excessive computational demand remains a serious impediment to their deployments on low-end IoT devices. With the emergence of edge computing, offloading grows into a promising technique to circumvent end-device limitations. However, transferring data between local and edge devices takes up a large proportion of time in existing offloading frameworks, creating a bottleneck for low-latency intelligent services. In this work, we propose a general framework, called deep compressive offloading. By integrating compressive sensing theory and deep learning, our framework can encode data for offloading into tiny sizes with negligible overhead on local devices and decode the data on the edge server, while offering theoretical guarantees on perfect reconstruction and lossless inference. By trading edge computing resources for data transmission time, our design can significantly reduce offloading latency with almost no accuracy loss. We build a deep compressive offloading system to serve state-of-the-art computer vision and speech recognition services. With comprehensive evaluations, our system can consistently reduce end-to-end latency by 2× to 4× with 1% accuracy loss, compared to state-of-the-art neural network offloading systems. In conditions of limited network bandwidth or intensive background traffic, our system can further speed up the neural network inference by up to 35×1.
The combination of the infrastructure provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) with numerous processing nodes present at the Edge Computing (EC) ecosystem opens up new pathways to support intelligent applications. Such applications can be provided upon humongous volumes of data collected by IoT devices being transferred to the edge nodes through the network. Various processing activities can be performed on the discussed data and multiple collaborative opportunities between EC nodes can facilitate the execution of the desired tasks. In order to support an effective interaction between edge nodes, the knowledge about the geographically distributed data should be shared. Obviously, the migration of large amounts of data will harm the stability of the network stability and its performance. In this paper, we recommend the exchange of data synopses than real data between EC nodes to provide them with the necessary knowledge about peer nodes owning similar data. This knowledge can be valuable when considering decisions such as data/service migration and tasks offloading. We describe an continuous reasoning model that builds a temporal similarity map of the available datasets to get nodes understanding the evolution of data in their peers. We support the proposed decision making mechanism through an intelligent similarity extraction scheme based on an unsupervised machine learning model, and, at the same time, combine it with a statistical measure that represents the trend of the so-called discrepancy quantum. Our model can reveal the differences in the exchanged synopses and provide a datasets similarity map which becomes the appropriate knowledge base to support the desired processing activities. We present the problem under consideration and suggest a solution for that, while, at the same time, we reveal its advantages and disadvantages through a large number of experiments.
A novel energy-efficient edge computing paradigm is proposed for real-time deep learning-based image upsampling applications. State-of-the-art deep learning solutions for image upsampling are currently trained using either resize or sub-pixel convolution to learn kernels that generate high fidelity images with minimal artifacts. However, performing inference with these learned convolution kernels requires memory-intensive feature map transformations that dominate time and energy costs in real-time applications. To alleviate this pressure on memory bandwidth, we confine the use of resize or sub-pixel convolution to training in the cloud by transforming learned convolution kernels to deconvolution kernels before deploying them for inference as a functionally equivalent deconvolution. These kernel transformations, intended as a one-time cost when shifting from training to inference, enable a systems designer to use each algorithm in their optimal context by preserving the image fidelity learned when training in the cloud while minimizing data transfer penalties during inference at the edge. We also explore existing variants of deconvolution inference algorithms and introduce a novel variant for consideration. We analyze and compare the inference properties of convolution-based upsampling algorithms using a quantitative model of incurred time and energy costs and show that using deconvolution for inference at the edge improves both system latency and energy efficiency when compared to their sub-pixel or resize convolution counterparts.
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed model for deep learning that integrates client-server architecture, edge computing, and real-time intelligence. FL has the capability of revolutionizing machine learning (ML) but lacks in the practicality of implementation due to technological limitations, communication overhead, non-IID (independent and identically distributed) data, and privacy concerns. Training a ML model over heterogeneous non-IID data highly degrades the convergence rate and performance. The existing traditional and clustered FL algorithms exhibit two main limitations, including inefficient client training and static hyper-parameter utilization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel hybrid algorithm, namely genetic clustered FL (Genetic CFL), that clusters edge devices based on the training hyper-parameters and genetically modifies the parameters cluster-wise. Then, we introduce an algorithm that drastically increases the individual cluster accuracy by integrating the density-based clustering and genetic hyper-parameter optimization. The results are bench-marked using MNIST handwritten digit dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset. The proposed genetic CFL shows significant improvements and works well with realistic cases of non-IID and ambiguous data.
Edge technology aims to bring Cloud resources (specifically, the compute, storage, and network) to the closed proximity of the Edge devices, i.e., smart devices where the data are produced and consumed. Embedding computing and application in Edge devices lead to emerging of two new concepts in Edge technology, namely, Edge computing and Edge analytics. Edge analytics uses some techniques or algorithms to analyze the data generated by the Edge devices. With the emerging of Edge analytics, the Edge devices have become a complete set. Currently, Edge analytics is unable to provide full support for the execution of the analytic techniques. The Edge devices cannot execute advanced and sophisticated analytic algorithms following various constraints such as limited power supply, small memory size, limited resources, etc. This article aims to provide a detailed discussion on Edge analytics. A clear explanation to distinguish between the three concepts of Edge technology, namely, Edge devices, Edge computing, and Edge analytics, along with their issues. Furthermore, the article discusses the implementation of Edge analytics to solve many problems in various areas such as retail, agriculture, industry, and healthcare. In addition, the research papers of the state-of-the-art edge analytics are rigorously reviewed in this article to explore the existing issues, emerging challenges, research opportunities and their directions, and applications.
The development of lightweight object detectors is essential due to the limited computation resources. To reduce the computation cost, how to generate redundant features plays a significant role. This paper proposes a new lightweight Convolution method Cross-Stage Lightweight (CSL) Module, to generate redundant features from cheap operations. In the intermediate expansion stage, we replaced Pointwise Convolution with Depthwise Convolution to produce candidate features. The proposed CSL-Module can reduce the computation cost significantly. Experiments conducted at MS-COCO show that the proposed CSL-Module can approximate the fitting ability of Convolution-3x3. Finally, we use the module to construct a lightweight detector CSL-YOLO, achieving better detection performance with only 43% FLOPs and 52% parameters than Tiny-YOLOv4.
The current concept of Smart Cities influences urban planners and researchers to provide modern, secured and sustainable infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its residents. To fulfill this need video surveillance cameras have been deployed to enhance the safety and well-being of the citizens. Despite technical developments in modern science, abnormal event detection in surveillance video systems is challenging and requires exhaustive human efforts. In this paper, we surveyed various methodologies developed to detect anomalies in intelligent video surveillance. Firstly, we revisit the surveys on anomaly detection in the last decade. We then present a systematic categorization of methodologies developed for ease of understanding. Considering the notion of anomaly depends on context, we identify different objects-of-interest and publicly available datasets in anomaly detection. Since anomaly detection is considered a time-critical application of computer vision, our emphasis is on anomaly detection using edge devices and approaches explicitly designed for them. Further, we discuss the challenges and opportunities involved in anomaly detection at the edge.
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) refers to the concept of placing computational capability and applications at the edge of the network, providing benefits such as reduced latency in handling client requests, reduced network congestion, and improved performance of applications. The performance and reliability of MEC are degraded significantly when one or several edge servers in the cluster are overloaded. Especially when a server crashes due to the overload, it causes service failures in MEC. In this work, an adaptive admission control policy to prevent edge node from getting overloaded is presented. This approach is based on a recently-proposed low complexity RL (Reinforcement Learning) algorithm called SALMUT (Structure-Aware Learning for Multiple Thresholds), which exploits the structure of the optimal admission control policy in multi-class queues for an average-cost setting. We extend the framework to work for node overload-protection problem in a discounted-cost setting. The proposed solution is validated using several scenarios mimicking real-world deployments in two different settings - computer simulations and a docker testbed. Our empirical evaluations show that the total discounted cost incurred by SALMUT is similar to state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms such as PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) and A2C (Advantage Actor Critic) but requires an order of magnitude less time to train, outputs easily interpretable policy, and can be deployed in an online manner.
Edge computing provides a promising paradigm to support the implementation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by offloading tasks to nearby edge nodes. Meanwhile, the increasing network size makes it impractical for centralized data processing due to limited bandwidth, and consequently a decentralized learning scheme is preferable. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely investigated and shown to be a promising solution for decision-making and optimal control processes. For RL in a decentralized setup, edge nodes (agents) connected through a communication network aim to work collaboratively to find a policy to optimize the global reward as the sum of local rewards. However, communication costs, scalability and adaptation in complex environments with heterogeneous agents may significantly limit the performance of decentralized RL. Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has a structure that allows for decentralized implementation, and has shown faster convergence than gradient descent based methods. Therefore, we propose an adaptive stochastic incremental ADMM (asI-ADMM) algorithm and apply the asI-ADMM to decentralized RL with edge-computing-empowered IIoT networks. We provide convergence properties for proposed algorithms by designing a Lyapunov function and prove that the asI-ADMM has $O(\frac{1}{k}) +O(\frac{1}{M})$ convergence rate where $k$ and $ M$ are the number of iterations and batch samples, respectively. Then, we test our algorithm with two supervised learning problems. For performance evaluation, we simulate two applications in decentralized RL settings with homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. The experiment results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the state of the art in terms of communication costs and scalability, and can well adapt to complex IoT environments.
Deep neural networks can be converted to multi-exit architectures by inserting early exit branches after some of their intermediate layers. This allows their inference process to become dynamic, which is useful for time critical IoT applications with stringent latency requirements, but with time-variant communication and computation resources. In particular, in edge computing systems and IoT networks where the exact computation time budget is variable and not known beforehand. Vision Transformer is a recently proposed architecture which has since found many applications across various domains of computer vision. In this work, we propose seven different architectures for early exit branches that can be used for dynamic inference in Vision Transformer backbones. Through extensive experiments involving both classification and regression problems, we show that each one of our proposed architectures could prove useful in the trade-off between accuracy and speed.
Edge intelligence, a new paradigm to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) applications by leveraging computing resources on the network edge, can be used to improve intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, due to physical limitations and energy-supply constraints, the computing powers of edge equipment are usually limited. High altitude platform station (HAPS) computing can be considered as a promising extension of edge computing. HAPS is deployed in the stratosphere to provide wide coverage and strong computational capabilities. It is suitable to coordinate terrestrial resources and store the fundamental data associated with ITS-based applications. In this work, three computing layers,i.e., vehicles, terrestrial network edges, and HAPS, are integrated to build a computation framework for ITS, where the HAPS data library stores the fundamental data needed for the applications. In addition, the caching technique is introduced for network edges to store some of the fundamental data from the HAPS so that large propagation delays can be reduced. We aim to minimize the delay of the system by optimizing computation offloading and caching decisions as well as bandwidth and computing resource allocations. The simulation results highlight the benefits of HAPS computing for mitigating delays and the significance of caching at network edges.
Fall prevalence is high among elderly people, which is challenging due to the severe consequences of falling. This is why rapid assistance is a critical task. Ambient assisted living (AAL) uses recent technologies such as 5G networks and the internet of medical things (IoMT) to address this research area. Edge computing can reduce the cost of cloud communication, including high latency and bandwidth use, by moving conventional healthcare services and applications closer to end-users. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep learning (DL) have been used recently for automatic fall detection, as well as supporting healthcare services. However, DL requires a vast amount of data and substantial processing power to improve its performance for the IoMT linked to the traditional edge computing environment. This research proposes an effective fall detection framework based on DL algorithms and mobile edge computing (MEC) within 5G wireless networks, the aim being to empower IoMT-based healthcare applications. We also propose the use of a deep gated recurrent unit (DGRU) neural network to improve the accuracy of existing DL-based fall detection methods. DGRU has the advantage of dealing with time-series IoMT data, and it can reduce the number of parameters and avoid the vanishing gradient problem. The experimental results on two public datasets show that the DGRU model of the proposed framework achieves higher accuracy rates compared to the current related works on the same datasets.
Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) have the potential to revolutionize the way that deep learning is carried out in edge computing platforms. However, the effectiveness of interpretability methods on these networks has not been assessed. In this paper, we compare the performance of several widely used saliency map-based interpretabilty techniques (Gradient, SmoothGrad and GradCAM), when applied to Binarized or Full Precision Neural Networks (FPNNs). We found that the basic Gradient method produces very similar-looking maps for both types of network. However, SmoothGrad produces significantly noisier maps for BNNs. GradCAM also produces saliency maps which differ between network types, with some of the BNNs having seemingly nonsensical explanations. We comment on possible reasons for these differences in explanations and present it as an example of why interpretability techniques should be tested on a wider range of network types.
With the advancement of deep neural networks and computer vision-based Human Activity Recognition, employment of Point-Cloud Data technologies (LiDAR, mmWave) has seen a lot interests due to its privacy preserving nature. Given the high promise of accurate PCD technologies, we develop, PALMAR, a multiple-inhabitant activity recognition system by employing efficient signal processing and novel machine learning techniques to track individual person towards developing an adaptive multi-inhabitant tracking and HAR system. More specifically, we propose (i) a voxelized feature representation-based real-time PCD fine-tuning method, (ii) efficient clustering (DBSCAN and BIRCH), Adaptive Order Hidden Markov Model based multi-person tracking and crossover ambiguity reduction techniques and (iii) novel adaptive deep learning-based domain adaptation technique to improve the accuracy of HAR in presence of data scarcity and diversity (device, location and population diversity). We experimentally evaluate our framework and systems using (i) a real-time PCD collected by three devices (3D LiDAR and 79 GHz mmWave) from 6 participants, (ii) one publicly available 3D LiDAR activity data (28 participants) and (iii) an embedded hardware prototype system which provided promising HAR performances in multi-inhabitants (96%) scenario with a 63% improvement of multi-person tracking than state-of-art framework without losing significant system performances in the edge computing device.
Feature selection refers to the process of selecting useful features for machine learning tasks, and it is also a key step for structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper proposes a fast feature selection algorithm by efficiently computing the sum of squared canonical correlation coefficients between monitored features and target variables of interest in greedy search. The proposed algorithm is applied to both synthetic and real datasets to illustrate its advantages in terms of computational speed, general classification and regression tasks, as well as damage-sensitive feature selection tasks. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated under varying environmental conditions and on an edge computing device to investigate its applicability in real-world SHM scenarios. The results show that the proposed algorithm can successfully select useful features with extraordinarily fast computational speed, which implies that the proposed algorithm has great potential where features need to be selected and updated online frequently, or where devices have limited computing capability.
The capabilities of natural neural systems have inspired new generations of machine learning algorithms as well as neuromorphic very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits capable of fast, low-power information processing. However, it has been argued that most modern machine learning algorithms are not neurophysiologically plausible. In particular, the workhorse of modern deep learning, the backpropagation algorithm, has proven difficult to translate to neuromorphic hardware. In this study, we present a neuromorphic, spiking backpropagation algorithm based on synfire-gated dynamical information coordination and processing, implemented on Intel's Loihi neuromorphic research processor. We demonstrate a proof-of-principle three-layer circuit that learns to classify digits from the MNIST dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first work to show a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) implementation of the backpropagation algorithm that is fully on-chip, without a computer in the loop. It is competitive in accuracy with off-chip trained SNNs and achieves an energy-delay product suitable for edge computing. This implementation shows a path for using in-memory, massively parallel neuromorphic processors for low-power, low-latency implementation of modern deep learning applications.
The growth of 5G and edge computing has enabled the emergence of Internet of Vehicles. It supports different types of services with different resource and service requirements. However, limited resources at the edge, high mobility of vehicles, increasing demand, and dynamicity in service request-types have made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. Handling dynamics in IoV for service placement is an important and challenging problem which is the primary focus of our work in this paper. We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Dynamic Service Placement (DRLD-SP) framework with the objective of minimizing the maximum edge resource usage and service delay while considering the vehicle's mobility, varying demand, and dynamics in the requests for different types of services. We use SUMO and MATLAB to carry out simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed DRLD-SP approach is effective and outperforms other static and dynamic placement approaches.