A trust evaluation scheme of service providers in mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new computing paradigm that brings cloud services to the network edge. Despite its great need in terms of computational services in daily life, service users may have several concerns while selecting a suitable service provider to fulfil their computational requirements. Such concerns are: with whom they are dealing with, where will their private data migrate to, service provider processing performance quality. Therefore, this paper presents a trust evaluation scheme that evaluates the processing performance of a service provider in the MEC environment. Processing performance of service providers is evaluated in terms of average processing success rate and processing throughput, thus allocating a service provider in a relevant trust status. Service provider processing incompliance and user termination ratio are also computed during provider’s interactions with users. This is in an attempt to help future service users to be acknowledged of service provider’s past interactions prior dealing with it. Thus, eliminating the probability of existing compromised service providers and raising the security and success of future interactions between service providers and users. Simulations results show service providers processing performance degree, processing incompliance and user termination ratio. A service provider is allocated to a trust status according to the evaluated processing performance trust degree.

Service Provisioning for Multi-source IoT Applications in Mobile Edge Computing

We are embracing an era of Internet of Things (IoT). The latency brought by unstable wireless networks caused by limited resources of IoT devices seriously impacts the quality of services of users, particularly the service delay they experienced. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology provides promising solutions to delay-sensitive IoT applications, where cloudlets (edge servers) are co-located with wireless access points in the proximity of IoT devices. The service response latency for IoT applications can be significantly shortened due to that their data processing can be performed in a local MEC network. Meanwhile, most IoT applications usually impose Service Function Chain (SFC) enforcement on their data transmission, where each data packet from its source gateway of an IoT device to the destination (a cloudlet) of the IoT application must pass through each Virtual Network Function (VNF) in the SFC in an MEC network. However, little attention has been paid on such a service provisioning of multi-source IoT applications in an MEC network with SFC enforcement. In this article, we study service provisioning in an MEC network for multi-source IoT applications with SFC requirements and aiming at minimizing the cost of such service provisioning, where each IoT application has multiple data streams from different sources to be uploaded to a location (cloudlet) in the MEC network for aggregation, processing, and storage purposes. To this end, we first formulate two novel optimization problems: the cost minimization problem of service provisioning for a single multi-source IoT application, and the service provisioning problem for a set of multi-source IoT applications, respectively, and show that both problems are NP-hard. Second, we propose a service provisioning framework in the MEC network for multi-source IoT applications that consists of uploading stream data from multiple sources of the IoT application to the MEC network, data stream aggregation and routing through the VNF instance placement and sharing, and workload balancing among cloudlets. Third, we devise an efficient algorithm for the cost minimization problem built upon the proposed service provisioning framework, and further extend the solution for the service provisioning problem of a set of multi-source IoT applications. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising.

The Construction of University Network Education System Based on Mobile Edge Computing in the Era of Big Data

This article first established a university network education system model based on physical failure repair behavior at the big data infrastructure layer and then examined in depth the complex common causes of multiple data failures in the big data environment caused by a single physical machine failure, all based on the principle of mobile edge computing. At the application service layer, a performance model based on queuing theory is first established, with the amount of available resources as a conditional parameter. The model examines important events in mobile edge computing, such as queue overflow and timeout failure. The impact of failure repair behavior on the random change of system dynamic energy consumption is thoroughly investigated, and a system energy consumption model is developed as a result. The network education system in colleges and universities includes a user login module, teaching resource management module, student and teacher management module, online teaching management module, student achievement management module, student homework management module, system data management module, and other business functions. Later, the theory of mobile edge computing proposed a set of comprehensive evaluation indicators that characterize the relevance, such as expected performance and expected energy consumption. Based on these evaluation indicators, a new indicator was proposed to quantify the complex constraint relationship. Finally, a functional use case test was conducted, focusing on testing the query function of online education information; a performance test was conducted in the software operating environment, following the development of the test scenario, and the server’s CPU utilization rate was tested while the software was running. The results show that the designed network education platform is relatively stable and can withstand user access pressure. The performance ratio indicator can effectively assist the cloud computing system in selecting a more appropriate option for the migrated traditional service system.

Optimization of Cooperative Offloading Model with Cost Consideration in Mobile Edge Computing

The combination of idle computing resources in mobile devices and the computing capacity of mobile edge servers enables all available devices in an edge network to complete all computing tasks in coordination to effectively improve the computing capacity of the edge network. This is a research hotspot for 5G technology applications. Previous research has focused on the minimum energy consumption and/or delay to determine the formulation of the computational offloading strategy but neglected the cost required for the computation of collaborative devices (mobile devices, mobile edge servers, etc.); therefore, we proposed a cost-based collaborative computation offloading model. In this model, when a task requests these devices' assistance in computing, it needs to pay the corresponding calculation cost; and on this basis, the task is offloaded and computed. In addition, for the model, we propose an adaptive neighborhood search based on simulated annealing algorithm (ANSSA) to jointly optimize the offloading decision and resource allocation with the goal of minimizing the sum of both the energy consumption and calculation cost. The adaptive mechanism enables different operators to update the probability of selection according to historical experience and environmental perception, which makes the individual evolution have certain autonomy. A large number of experiments conducted on different scales of mobile user instances show that the ANSSA can obtain satisfactory time performance with guaranteed solution quality. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the mobile edge computing (MEC) offloading system. It is of great significance to strike a balance between maintaining the life cycle of smart mobile devices and breaking the performance bottleneck of MEC servers.

Task Offloading and Scheduling Strategy for Intelligent Prosthesis in Mobile Edge Computing Environment

Traditional intent recognition algorithms of intelligent prosthesis often use deep learning technology. However, deep learning’s high accuracy comes at the expense of high computational and energy consumption requirements. Mobile edge computing is a viable solution to meet the high computation and real-time execution requirements of deep learning algorithm on mobile device. In this paper, we consider the computation offloading problem of multiple heterogeneous edge servers in intelligent prosthesis scenario. Firstly, we present the problem definition and the detail design of MEC-based task offloading model for deep neural network. Then, considering the mobility of amputees, the mobility-aware energy consumption model and latency model are proposed. By deploying the deep learning-based motion intent recognition algorithm on intelligent prosthesis in a real-world MEC environment, the effectiveness of the task offloading and scheduling strategy is demonstrated. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can always find the optimal task offloading and scheduling decision.