The integration of Energy Harvesting (EH) technology into Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) presents a promising solution to the energy limitations faced by end devices (EDs) when performing computation-intensive tasks, ultimately enhancing the EDs’ sustainability. However, the intermittent and unpredictable nature of harvested energy introduces significant uncertainty in energy availability, complicating dynamic task execution and resource management. In EH-MEC systems, managing task scheduling and offloading dynamically is crucial for optimizing application latency while ensuring long-term battery energy stability and task reliability. Existing approaches inadequately address the time-coupling between task decisions caused by long-term battery energy stability constraints, and often neglect task reliability considerations. To overcome these limitations, we propose decomposing the original problem into 1) a decoupling problem that transforms the optimization with long-term battery energy constraints into a series of deterministic optimizations within individual time slots, 2) a task scheduling problem that determines task-to-ES assignment and computing resource allocation of ESs to offloaded tasks, and 3) a task offloading problem that determines the optimal offloading decision to achieve minimal latency while meeting energy stability and server reliability constraints. To tackle these subproblems, we design a Lyapunov-based optimization method, a reliabilityaware task scheduling algorithm, and an efficient heuristic-based task offloading algorithm. Extensive simulations and experiments based on empirical data from a physical MEC testbed validate the efficacy of our approach.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance, leading to diverse applications across various mobile devices (MDs). Considering factors like portability and environmental sustainability, an increasing number of MDs are adopting energy harvesting (EH) techniques for power supply. However, the computational intensity of DNNs presents significant challenges for their deployment on these resource-constrained devices. Existing approaches often employ DNN partition or offloading to mitigate the time and energy consumption associated with running DNNs on MDs. Nonetheless, existing methods frequently fall short in accurately modeling the execution time of DNNs, and do not consider to use thread allocation for further latency and energy consumption optimization. To solve these problems, we propose a dynamic DNN partition and thread allocation method to optimize the latency and energy consumption of running DNNs on EH-enabled MDs. Specifically, we first investigate the relationship between DNN inference latency and allocated threads and establish an accurate DNN latency prediction model. Based on the prediction model, a DRL-based DNN partition (DDP) algorithm is designed to find the optimal partitions for DNNs. A thread allocation (TA) algorithm is proposed to reduce the inference latency. Experimental results from our test-bed platform demonstrate that compared to four benchmarking methods, our scheme can reduce DNN inference latency and energy consumption by up to 37.3% and 38.5%.

The widespread adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across diverse applications has intensified the demand for efficient execution strategies on GPU-CPU heterogeneous devices. While existing device-oriented DNN partitioning methods optimize either energy consumption or execution latency in isolation, they often lack the capability to dynamically adapt partitioning strategies under real-world constraints. To address these limitations, we first formulate the DNN partitioning problem as an optimal execution path search on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), then propose an imitation learning (IL)-based DNN partitioning framework that dynamically allocates DNN layers across GPU-CPU processors to minimize energy consumption while satisfying time constraints. Specifically, we first design aProfiler, which analyzes the layer-wise characteristics such as the execution time and energy consumption of layers in DNNs executed on the GPU-CPU heterogeneous device. Then, we present anOracle Generatorthat generates high-quality partitioning solutions based on the Dijkstra algorithm to form a training datasetOracle.Oraclefrom the proposed generator is input to a proposed Trainer, which iteratively learns from theOracledata to obtain a regression model namedPredictor.Predictorcan predict the optimal partitioning strategy for DNNs in real time. Finally, we design aData Aggregator, which enhancesOracledata through continuous runtime feedback, thereby improving the prediction accuracy of the regression model. We evaluate the proposed IL-based DNN partitioning method on 3 NVIDIA Jetson platforms and 1 Huawei NPU platform. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to 3 benchmarking methods, our method reduces energy consumption by up to 73.15%.

As smart mobile applications increasingly demand timely situational awareness and energy efficiency, the Age of Information (AoI) metric plays a vital role in maintaining data freshness. This need is further supported by the End-Edge-Cloud Computing (EECC) paradigm, which enhances application performance by facilitating task offloading to the edge or the cloud. However, existing AoI optimization solutions focus solely on task offloading, often neglecting critical aspects such as system resource allocation and energy efficiency, which can lead to resource waste, increased energy consumption, compromised Quality of Service (QoS), and system performance degradation. Therefore, this paper investigates the joint optimization of task offloading, communication and computing resource allocation in EECC systems, aiming to minimize AoI and energy consumption under constraints of deadlines and capacity constraints. To address this problem, we divide the decision space into multiple non-intersecting decision areas based on the characteristics of the studied problem and design a task offloading and resource allocation algorithm based on slow-movement particle swarm optimization (SPSO) to handle each decision area individually. In the algorithm design, we customize the position, velocity, update rules, and fitness function for the optimization problem. Finally, extensive simulation-based and testbed experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can save up to 14.56% of energy consumption, shorten AoI by up to 27.80%, and improve utility (weighted sum of AoI and energy consumption) by up to 15.89% compared with existing algorithms.

This letter focuses on integrated CPU-GPU edge systems with renewable energy sources and studies the resource management problem to minimize the energy consumption of real-time tasks while ensuring temperature and reliability constraints. We propose an imitation learning (IL)-based resource management scheme, ILRM, implemented in two phases: 1) offline Oracle generation and 2) online IL. In the offline phase, we design a fast-converging heuristic to generate near-optimal solutions (i.e., Oracles) for training an online prediction model. In the online phase, we realize IL using the trained model that predicts the resource configuration policies for the incoming task sets to be scheduled. A data aggregation method is also developed to enhance the robustness of the prediction model. We validate ILRM through extensive experiments on both simulated and real integrated CPU-GPU edge platforms.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has received wide attention recently due to its efficacy in alleviating the computation stress of mobile devices (MDs), which is realized by offloading workloads from MD users to nearby edge servers (ESs). Prior work has studied related task offloading and scheduling problems and proposed many approaches. However, none of these approaches considers the reliability issue in MEC systems which may suffer soft errors during task execution as well as bit errors during task offloading simultaneously. Targeting optimization on a multi-user MEC system, in this article we investigate the task offloading and scheduling problem of maximizing system quality of experience (QoE) under a certain reliability requirement. With the consideration of the combinatorial nature of this problem, we propose to decompose the original problem into i) a task-to-ES assignment problem with fixed task offloading decision, for satisfying system reliability constraint, ii) a computing resource allocation problem with fixed task offloading and assignment decisions, for maximizing system QoE, and iii) a task offloading optimization problem to find the best offloading decision that achieves the maximum QoE under the reliability constraint using our task assignment and resource allocation methods. In order to solve these sub-problems, we further design a reliability-aware task-to-ES assignment algorithm, a QoE-optimum resource allocation algorithm, and a binary particle swarm optimization based task offloading algorithm. We perform extensive simulations and testbed experiments to validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. Simulation and testbed results show that the proposed scheme greatly outperforms four benchmark approaches and it achieves up to 63.2% and 43.1% increase in the average QoE (quantified by offloading utility), respectively.

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is a critical tool for evaluating the security of cryptographic devices, as physical leakage can reveal sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Multi-channel fusion attacks (MCFAs) have proven to be efficient in exploiting side-channel leakages. However, a crucial step before performing MCFA is to assess whether the leakages from different channels can be effectively fused. To address this, we propose a black-box approach based on the χ2test of independence to assess multi-channel leakage suitability for fusion. By treating the leakages as categorical variables, our method evaluates their association without requiring knowledge of the cryptographic key or device implementation.

The market penetration of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in cloud computing is increasing benefiting from its flexibility and scalability. One of the most important issues for IaaS cloud service providers is to minimize the monetary cost while meeting cloud user experience requirements such as makespan and security. Prior works on cloud service cost minimization ignore either security or makespan which is very important for user experience. In this paper, we propose a two-stage algorithm to solve the cloud service cost minimization problem at the premise of satisfying the security and makespan requirements of cloud users. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose a novel security service selection scheme to ensure system security by judiciously selecting security services with low cost for tasks under the constraints of time and security. In the second stage, to further reduce the cloud service cost, we design a workflow scheduling method based on an improved firefly algorithm (IFA). The IFA-based method schedules cloud service workflows to virtual machines of small cost at the premise of guaranteeing security and makespan. It can quickly find the workflow scheduling solution with minimized cost using our designed updating scheme and mapping operator. Extensive simulations are conducted on real-world workflows to verify the efficacy of the proposed two-stage method. Simulation results show that the proposed two-stage method outperforms the baseline and two benchmarking methods in terms of cost minimization without violating security and time constraints. Compared to benchmarking methods, the cloud service cost can be reduced by up to 57.6% by using our proposed approach.

Cloud computing has attracted wide attention from both academia and industry, since it can provide flexible and on-demand hardware and software resources as services. Energy consumption of cloud servers is the main concern of cloud service providers since reducing energy consumption can bring them a lower operation cost (and hence a higher profit) and alleviate carbon footprints to the environment. Typically, the common power management techniques for enhancing energy efficiency would make cloud servers more vulnerable to soft errors and hence adversely impact the quality of services. Thus, reliability cannot be ignored in the design of methodologies for improving the energy efficiency of cloud servers. In this article, we aim to minimize the energy consumption of cloud servers under the soft-error reliability constraint by configuring the size and speed of servers. Specifically, we first derive the expected reliability based energy consumption of cloud servers to formulate the reliability-constrained energy minimization problem. We then leverage the reinforcement learning technique to obtain an optimal server configuration solution that maximizes system energy efficiency while maintaining the system reliability constraint. Finally, we perform extensive simulation experiments to analyze the relationship between system energy consumption and server configuration under varying arrival rates and execution requirements of service requests. Comparative experiments are also performed to validate the efficacy of the proposed learning-based server configuration scheme. Results show that compared to a benchmark method, the energy saved by the proposed scheme can reach up to 31.5%.

The network system deployed in hazardous environments is a key component of hazard-aware cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and its performance highly depends on surrounding environments. Due to the mobility of network nodes (e.g., portable IoT devices), frequently changeable network topology and links, as well as other external interferences such as electromagnetic interference, ensuring adaptivity and reliability of hazard-aware CPSs is of utmost importance. Meanwhile, the timeliness of message transmission is stringent in hazardous environments because the violation of timing requirements may lead to serious consequences. Last but not least, portable IoT devices are typically energy limited, thus ensuring a sustainable message transmission is highly necessary. In this paper, we aim at optimizing the reliability of hazard-aware CPSs while meeting the timing and energy constraints. To this end, we develop the first hazard-aware CPS model and study the impacts of surrounding environments (i.e., physical side) to the network infrastructure of a hazard-aware CPS (i.e., cyber side) with respect to reliability. We also propose a new scheme that adaptively tunes the fault tolerance strategies and admission strategies for real-time messages, to increase the reliability of hazard-aware CPSs under the energy constraint. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is capable of increasing system reliability by up to 4.21× with a lower deadline miss rate and runtime overhead compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

The maturation of energy harvesting technologies enables the integration of batteryless devices in advanced computing paradigms. For example, in mobile edge computing (MEC), batteryless mobile devices can charge when they have insufficient energy to perform task offloading, thereby relaxing the energy constraints in developing offloading strategies. This paper studies the problem of minimizing the latency of task execution in an MEC system with multiple resource-limited servers and multiple batteryless devices under intermittent operation conditions. We formulate this problem as an integer program-based optimization model and propose a discrete grey wolf optimizer (DGWO) algorithm to solve the formulated problem. DGWO uses a task sequence, which is a permutation of all tasks to be offloaded, to represent an offloading solution and introduces a discrete representation of grey wolves to link each grey wolf with a solution. For each discrete grey wolf, we design an effective task allocation strategy to designate the computing resources of MEC servers for each offloaded task. We further define a set of discrete operations upon the discrete representation to update the positions of grey wolves, for the purpose of enhancing DGWO’s global search capability. Experimental results demonstrate that DGWO outperforms other baseline metaheuristics with reduced task execution latency and improved computational efficiency.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an indispensable data sensing and processing platform in Internet of Things (IoT) for intelligent transportation. The mounted cameras on the vehicles along with the fixed roadside cameras are utilized to provide pictorial services for IoV users and law enforcement agencies. For such forensic services, ensuring the security and privacy of vehicles while guaranteeing the efficiency of data transmission among vehicles is important. In this paper, we propose a lightweight incentive authentication scheme (LIAS) for forensic services in IoV. LIAS is developed on a three-tier architecture containing cloud layer, fog layer, and user layer. LIAS uses pairing-free certificateless signcryption, pseudonym update mechanism, and incentive mechanism to realize a secure anonymous authentication efficiently. We conduct correctness and security analysis, as well as performance analysis and evaluation to validate the high security and efficiency of LIAS. Experimental results reveal that, the communication and computation overheads as well as the message delay and packet loss of LIAS are much lower than those of state-of-the-art techniques. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the security and privacy issues of forensic services in IoV for intelligent transportation. Our goal is to improve the security and privacy of vehicles while guaranteeing the lightweight and incentive of data transmission among the vehicles. Fog-assisted IoV is introduced to fully utilize the capacities of near-user edge devices as well as the connections between fog nodes and devices. However, it still faces the difficulties in ensuring vehicles’ security and privacy. Moreover, vehicles’ information dissemination could be easily monitored because of the unavoidable defect of wireless communication. Thereby, it is essential to guarantee the security and privacy of vehicles while enhancing the efficiency of vehicles’ data transmission during the forensic service. To this end, this paper proposes a lightweight conditional anonymous authentication scheme for forensic services in IoV, which is developed based on the pairing-free technique to achieve secure anonymous authentication with high efficiency. This paper also designs a user tracing mechanism, incentive mechanism, and pseudonym update mechanism to realize safe and effective forensic service in IoV.

The main goal of a cloud provider is to make profits by providing services to users. Existing profit optimization strategies employ homogeneous user models in which user personality is ignored, resulting in fewer profits and particularly notably lower user satisfaction that in turn, leads to fewer users and reduced profits. In this article, we propose efficient personality-aware request scheduling schemes to maximize the profit of the cloud provider under the constraint of user satisfaction. Specifically, we first model the service requests at the granularity of individual personality and propose a personalized user satisfaction prediction model based on questionnaires. Subsequently, we design a personality-guided integer linear programming (ILP)-based request scheduling algorithm to maximize the profit under the constraint of user satisfaction, which is followed by an approximate but lightweight value assessment and cross entropy (VACE)-based profit improvement scheme. The VACE-based scheme is especially tailored for applications with high scheduling resolution. Extensive simulation results show that our satisfaction prediction model can achieve the accuracy of up to 83 percent, and our profit optimization schemes can improve the profit by at least 3.96 percent as compared to the benchmarking methods while still obtaining a speedup of at least 1.68x.

As an efficient commercial computing paradigm, cloud computing provides various computing and storage resources to users in a pay-as-you-go manner. However, existing cloud pricing models and mechanisms are deterministic to some degree, thus, may not work well in a real-world environment where user perceived values with respect to cloud services are dynamically changing and highly personalized. In this article, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL)-based dynamic cloud pricing scheme to optimize both cloud provider’s profit and costs of heterogeneous users with distinct personalities. Specifically, we first propose a novel personality-guided user perceived value prediction scheme to proactively capture the dynamics of the users’ perceived values with respect to cloud services. The prediction scheme models the relationship among user personality, service price, quality of service (QoS), user satisfaction and perceived value in the cloud service market. Second, on the basis of the prediction model, a RL-based cloud pricing mechanism is developed to learn sequential service pricing decision-making for profit and costs optimization. Particularly, the profit and costs optimization problem is modeled as a discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) that is solved by using Q-learning. Finally, extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to verify our user perceived value prediction scheme and RL-based cloud service pricing mechanism. Simulation results show that our perceived value prediction scheme can achieve up to 87.50 percent prediction accuracy, and our RL-based pricing mechanism can obtain up to 19.39 percent more profit than the state-of-the-art scheme.

As an efficient commercial information technology, cloud computing has attracted more and more users and enterprises to use it. Faced with such a large number and variety of customers, it is necessary for cloud providers (CPs) with limited budget to provide satisfactory customized pricing services, profitable customer and system investments, and flexible system resource provisioning strategies to improve both customer experience and long-term profit. Existing profit optimization research rarely considers customer diversity and dynamics, which may have a negative impact on long-term profit growth due to poor management of customer relations. In this article, we implement customer relationship management by considering both customer diversity and dynamics, and propose a customer adaptive resource provisioning scheme to maximize long-term profit under constrained budget. We consider four customer types (i.e., loyal, old, new, and lost) that can transition to each other during the customer's lifetime of interaction with the CP. The CP builds multiple cloud service sub-platforms, each of which contains multiple multiserver systems and serves the same type of customers. For the cloud service platform, we first analyze single multiserver system using an analytical method to obtain its optimal profit, invested funding, and system configuration. In particular, for systems serving new and lost customers, we develop a novel customer lifetime value (CLV)-based customer investment scheme that selects valuable customers for investment under limited marketing budget. Based on the above analysis, we then present a customer retention rate (CRR)-driven three-stage heuristic scheme that prioritizes investment in multiserver systems with endangered customers under limited infrastructure budget for reducing customer churn and promoting long-term profit growth. We conduct extensive simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method. Simulation results show that compared with the benchmark algorithms, our method can improve the long-term profit and CRR by up to 3.4x and 7.8x, respectively.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as intelligent road side units and video-based detectors, are being deployed in emerging applications like sustainable and intelligent transportation systems. The primary obstacles against the development of these IoT devices are various security threats and huge energy consumption. In this article, we study the problem of scheduling tasks onto a heterogeneous multiprocessor system on a chip (MPSoC) deployed in IoT for optimizing quality of security under energy, real-time, and task precedence constraints. We first provide a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for allocating and scheduling dependent tasks with energy and real-time constraints on a heterogeneous MPSoC system to maximize system quality of security. In order to efficiently solve the formulated MILP, we then propose an analysis-based two-stage scheme that determines the allocation, operating frequency, and security service of tasks to maximize system quality of security while satisfying the design constraints. We finally carry out extensive simulation experiments to validate our proposed two-stage scheme and MILP approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed two-stage scheme outperforms a number of representative existing approaches in saving energy and improving system quality of security. The results also show that the proposed MILP approach can achieve the best performance and the proposed two-stage scheme has a close performance to the MILP approach.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides flexibility and programmability for network management by using a layered structure composed of data plane, control plane, and application plane. A key enabling technique for the sustainability of SDN-based network infrastructure is the modeling of power consumed by SDN control planes. However, power modeling of control planes is not extensively investigated yet, and no generic methods have been developed for performance and power comparison of sustainable SDN control planes. In this paper, we propose analytical performance and power models for different network controllers by using queuing theory, and design a generic framework for performance and power evaluation of different sustainable SDN control planes. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed solution can precisely model the power and performance of the concerned SDN control planes such that different control planes can be benchmarked under a general framework, which enables the identification of suitable control planes for various SDN network applications.

Benefiting from rich resources and virtualization technologies, hybrid cloud has emerged as a promising solution to processing large-scale scientific workflow applications for users in a pay-as-you-go manner. However, considering the complexity of resource configuration and deployment in hybrid clouds, existing workflow scheduling strategies designed for traditional distributed computing systems are limited and powerless. Therefore, for profit-driven infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud providers, minimizing makespan and monetary cost of scheduling scientific workflows is an imperative concern. In this paper, we propose two efficient workflow scheduling approaches for hybrid clouds that both consider makespan and monetary cost. Specifically, we first propose a single-objective workflow scheduling optimization approach called DCOH (deadline-constrained cost optimization for hybrid clouds) for minimizing the monetary cost of scheduling workflows under deadline constraint. Based on DCOH, we further propose a multi-objective workflow scheduling optimization approach called MOH (multi-objective optimization for hybrid clouds) for optimizing makespan and monetary cost of scheduling workflows simultaneously. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of DCOH and MOH. Simulation results show that our DCOH approach can reduce up to 100.0% monetary cost for users as compared to the competing algorithms under the same deadline constraint and our MOH approach can achieve better cost-makespan trade-off solutions as compared to the competing algorithms.

With the advent of heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures, efficient scheduling for high performance has been of significant importance. However, joint considerations of reliability, temperature, and stochastic characteristics of precedence-constrained tasks for performance optimization make task scheduling particularly challenging. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by using an affinity (i.e., probability)-driven task allocation and scheduling approach that decouples schedule lengths and thermal profiles of processors. Specifically, we separately model the affinity of a task for processors with respect to schedule lengths and the affinity of a task for processors with regard to chip thermal profiles considering task reliability and stochastic characteristics of task execution time and intertask communication time. Subsequently, we combine the two types of affinities, and design a scheduling heuristic that assigns a task to the processor with the highest joint affinity. Extensive simulations based on randomly generated stochastic and real-world applications are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the system makespan by up to 30.1% without violating the temperature and reliability constraints compared to benchmarking methods.

EtherCAT has become one of the leading real-time Ethernet solutions for networked industrial systems, where a reliable communication infrastructure is needed due to highly error-prone environments. However, existing work on EtherCAT mainly focuses on clock synchronization and timeliness improvement. The reliability of EtherCAT-based networked systems has largely been ignored. In this paper, we present a proportional integral derivative (PID)-based feedback control scheme that aims at enhancing reliability of networked systems under timing and system resource constraints. Instead of retransmitting data upon error detection, we use forward error control technique based on inequality of arithmetic and geometric means to achieve the required system reliability at a low deadline miss rate of messages. We further optimize the forward error control technique and design a fast and fair error resilient mechanism by using a cooperative game. In addition to reliability enhancement, our PID-based error control scheme can also improve the stability of a system in terms of deadline miss rate in the presence of burst errors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve reliability enhancement of up to 91% compared to benchmarking methods.

EtherCAT has become one of the leading real-time Ethernet solutions for networked industrial systems where a reliable communication infrastructure is needed due to highly error-prone environments. However, existing work on EtherCAT mainly focuses on clock synchronization and timeliness improvement. The reliability of EtherCAT-based networked systems has largely been ignored. In this paper, we present a PID-based feedback control scheme that aims at enhancing reliability of networked systems under timing and system resource constraints. Instead of automatic repeat request method (ARQ), a forward error control technique is introduced to achieve the required system reliability at a lower deadline miss rate of messages. The PID-based feedback control scheme can also improve the stability of a system in terms of deadline miss rate in the presence of bursty errors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve reliability enhancement of up to 79% compared to benchmarking methods.

Internet of Things devices, such as video-based detectors or road side units are being deployed in emerging applications like sustainable and intelligent transportation systems. Oftentimes, stringent operation and energy cost constraints are exerted on this type of applications, necessitating a hybrid supply of renewable and grid energy. The key issue of a cost-constrained hybrid of renewable and grid power is its uncertainty in energy availability. The characteristic of approximate computation that accepts an approximate result when energy is limited and executes more computations yielding better results if more energy is available, can be exploited to intelligently handle the uncertainty. In this paper, we first propose an energy-adaptive task allocation scheme that optimally assigns real-time approximate-computation tasks to individual processors and subsequently enables a matching of the cost-constrained hybrid supply of energy with the energy demand of the resultant task schedule. We then present a quality of service (QoS)-driven task scheduling scheme that determines the optional execution cycles of tasks on individual processors for optimization of system QoS. A dynamic task scheduling scheme is also designed to adapt at runtime the task execution to the varying amount of the available energy. Simulation results show that our schemes can reduce system energy consumption by up to 29% and improve system QoS by up to 108% as compared to benchmarking algorithms.

With the rapid deployment of cloud computing infrastructures, understanding the economics of cloud computing has become a pressing issue for cloud service providers. However, existing pricing models rarely consider the dynamic interactions between user requests and the cloud service provider. Thus, the law of supply and demand in marketing is not fully explored in these pricing models. In this paper, we propose a dynamic pricing model based on the concept of user perceived value that accurately captures the real supply and demand relationship in the cloud service market. Subsequently, a profit maximization scheme is designed based on the dynamic pricing model that optimizes profit of the cloud service provider without violating service-level agreement. Finally, a dynamic closed loop control scheme is developed to adjust the cloud service price and multiserver configurations according to the dynamics of the cloud computing environment such as fluctuating electricity and rental fees. Extensive simulations using the data extracted from real-world applications validate the effectiveness of the proposed user perceived value-based pricing model and the dynamic profit maximization scheme. Our algorithm can achieve up to 31.32 percent profit improvement compared to a state-of-the-art approach.

With the rapid deployment of cloud computing infrastructures, understanding the economics of cloud computing has becoming a pressing issue for cloud service providers. However, existing pricing models rarely consider the dynamic interaction between user requests and the cloud service provider, thus can not accurately reflect the law of supply and demand in marketing. In this paper, we propose a pricing model based on the concept of user perceived value in the domain of economics that accurately capture the real supply and demand situation in the cloud service market. We then design a profit maximization scheme based on the presented dynamic pricing model that optimizes profit of the cloud service provider without violating user service-level agreement. Extensive experiments using data extracted from real-world applications validate the effectiveness of the proposed user perceived value-based pricing model. The proposed profit maximization scheme achieves 24.44% more profit as compared to the state of the art benchmarking methods.

With the emergence of hybrid software-defined network (SDN) that contains switches and all kinds of middleboxes, there are a lot of obvious problems that have been brought up in verifying data plane consistency. However, recent study in network verification neglected the dynamic data plane verification induced by stateful middleboxes. To handle this limitation, we propose a new method, Stateful Header Space Analysis (SHSA), to verify reachability and detect loops in hybrid software-defined network with stateful middleboxes. Moreover, we optimize the validation process on the base of header space analysis (HSA) and enhance the scalability of our verification algorithm. To validate the applicability of SHSA, we implement four kinds of stateful middleboxes by Open vSwitch and simulate the hybrid network. The experimental results indicate that our method could verify the dynamic data plane accurately. Compared the time cost between SHSA and HSA in Stanford University's backbone network, results show that the efficiency of our method is 30 percent higher than the latter approximately.