Ensuring stable and high-quality real-time video analytics for computationally constrained mobile agents is essential. However, limited computing resources and network bandwidth present significant challenges in meeting the objective of low response time and high inference accuracy. In this paper, we present DiVE, an edge-assisted video analytics system that utilizes motion vectors calculated by video codec to extract foregrounds and differentially encode frames. DiVE removes rotational components from motion vectors by solving over-determined linear equations and filters noisy motion vectors based on the observation that motion vectors of static objects point to the same point when the ego agent purely translates. To distinguish foregrounds from backgrounds, DiVE estimates the ground based on observations that all foregrounds stand on the ground and motion vectors on static objects at the same height have the same normalized magnitude. DiVE then uses region-growing-based clustering to identify foreground objects. An adaptive bitrate allocation method is applied to optimize accuracy under estimated bandwidth. We implement a prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of DiVE. The results demonstrate that DiVE can improve detection accuracy by up to 19.0% and reduce response time by up to 56.0% compared with other video analytics schemes in real-world traces.

Inertial measurement units (IMUs), have been prevalently used in a wide range of mobile perception applications such as activity recognition and user authentication, where a large amount of labelled data are normally required to train a satisfactory model. However, it is difficult to label micro-activities in massive IMU data due to the hardness of understanding raw IMU data and the lack of ground truth. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained user perception approach, called Saga, which only needs a small amount of labelled IMU data to achieve stunning user perception accuracy. The core idea of Saga is to first pre-train a backbone feature extraction model, utilizing the rich semantic information of different levels embedded in the massive unlabelled IMU data. Meanwhile, for a specific downstream user perception application, Bayesian Optimization is employed to determine the optimal weights for pre-training tasks involving different semantic levels. We implement Saga on five typical mobile phones and evaluate Saga on three typical tasks on three IMU datasets. Results show that when only using about 100 training samples per class, Saga can achieve over 90% accuracy of the full-fledged model trained on over ten thousands training samples with no additional system overhead.

To extend the receptive field of a mobile agent in complex scenarios, it is essential for multiple agents to cooperate with each other. However, it is challenging to achieve comprehensive 3D perception at the minimal computational and communication costs. In this paper, we propose CoPe, a lightweight and efficient collaborative 3D perception scheme for mobile agents. The main idea of CoPe is for an ego agent to query the most helpful information from its neighboring agents through a lightweight network attention mechanism. To this end, at each agent, we first leverage Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to decompose a full-size point cloud feature into components. Meanwhile, with the novel self-attention and cross-attention algorithms, we respectively select the key component of an ego agent that best represent the point cloud of the ego agent as a query, and valuable components of each helper agent that are most relevant to the query as the answer. After feature reconstruction and aggregation, an ego agent can have a comprehensive understanding about the scene and make accurate predictions on downstream tasks. CoPe is lightweight and can be easily implemented on mobile devices. Results of extensive experiments conducted on both real-world and simulation datasets demonstrate that CoPe can achieve superior 3D object detection accuracy while significantly reducing the incurred computational and communication costs.

Existing methods for integerized training speed up deep learning by using low-bitwidth integerized weights, activations, gradients, and optimizer buffers. However, they overlook the issue of full-precision latent weights, which consume excessive memory to accumulate gradient-based updates for optimizing the integerized weights. In this paper, we propose the first latent weight quantization schema for general integerized training, which minimizes quantization perturbation to training process via residual quantization with optimized dual quantizer. We leverage residual quantization to eliminate the correlation between latent weight and integerized weight for suppressing quantization noise. We further propose dual quantizer with optimal nonuniform codebook to avoid frozen weight and ensure statistically unbiased training trajectory as full-precision latent weight. The codebook is optimized to minimize the disturbance on weight update under importance guidance and achieved with a three-segment polyline approximation for hardware-friendly implementation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed schema allows integerized training with lowest 4-bit latent weight for various architectures including ResNets, MobileNetV2, and Transformers, and yields negligible performance loss in image classification and text generation. Furthermore, we successfully fine-tune Large Language Models with up to 13 billion parameters on one single GPU using the proposed schema.

Emerging Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications desire online prediction using deep neural network (DNN) models on mobile devices. However, due to the movement of devices,unfamiliartest samples constantly appear, significantly affecting the prediction accuracy of a pre-trained DNN. In addition, unstable network connection calls for local model inference. In this paper, we propose a light-weight scheme, calledAnole, to cope with the local DNN model inference on mobile devices. The core idea of Anole is to first establish an army of compact DNN models, and then adaptively select the model fitting the current test sample best for online inference. The key is to automatically identifymodel-friendlyscenes for training scene-specific DNN models. To this end, we design a weakly-supervised scene representation learning algorithm by combining both human heuristics and feature similarity in separating scenes. Moreover, we further train a model classifier to predict the best-fit scene-specific DNN model for each test sample. We implement Anole on different types of mobile devices and conduct extensive trace-driven and real-world experiments based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The results demonstrate that Anole outwits the method of using a versatile large DNN in terms of prediction accuracy (4.5% higher), response time (33.1% faster) and power consumption (45.1% lower).

Emerging Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications desire online prediction using deep neural network (DNN) models on mobile devices. However, due to the movement of devices, unfamiliar test samples constantly appear, significantly affecting the prediction accuracy of a pre-trained DNN. In addition, unstable network connection calls for local model inference. In this paper, we propose a light-weight scheme, called Anole, to cope with the local DNN model inference on mobile devices. The core idea of Anole is to first establish an army of compact DNN models, and then adaptively select the model fitting the current test sample best for online inference. The key is to automatically identify model-friendly scenes for training scene-specific DNN models. To this end, we design a weakly-supervised scene representation learning algorithm by combining both human heuristics and feature similarity in separating scenes. Moreover, we further train a model classifier to predict the best-fit scene-specific DNN model for each test sample. We implement Anole on different types of mobile devices and conduct extensive trace-driven and real-world experiments based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV s). The results demonstrate that Anole outwits the method of using a versatile large DNN in terms of prediction accuracy (4.5 % higher), response time (33.1 % faster) and power consumption (45.1 % lower).

Video analytics is the killer workload in edge computing, which involves the scheduler’s complex decisions to balance analysis performance (latency and accuracy) and resource consumption (network, computation, and energy). Traditional schedulers address this as a single-objective optimization problem with fixed weights, unable to precisely capture unknown system preferences due to intricate pricing rules across various service levels and resource costs, consequently leading to suboptimal system benefit like monetary gain. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian optimization-driven multi-objective scheduler, PaMO, that can proactively explore the system pricing preference by pairwise comparing outcome vectors of all objectives. Moreover, PaMO designs a heuristic scheduling algorithm with a zero-delay jitter guarantee to avoid performance degradation caused by resource contention and uses a revised Bayesian optimization algorithm to make video configuration and scheduling decisions. Experiments on real video analytics workloads show that PaMO can achieve up to 53.9% benefit gain compared to state-of-the-art scheduling methods.

Point cloud registration (PCR) can significantly extend the visual field and enhance the point density on distant objects, thereby improving driving safety. However, it is very challenging for vehicles to perform online registration between long-range point clouds. In this paper, we propose an online long-range PCR scheme in VANETs, called LoRaPCR, where vehicles achieve long-range registration through multi-hop short-range highly-accurate registrations. Given the NP-hardness of the problem, a heuristic algorithm is developed to determine best registration paths while leveraging the reuse of registration results to reduce computation costs. Moreover, we utilize an optimized dynamic programming algorithm to determine the transmission routes while minimizing the communication overhead. Results of extensive simulations demonstrate that LoRaPCR can achieve high PCR accuracy with low relative translation and rotation errors of 0.55 meters and 1.43°, respectively, at a distance of over 100 meters, and reduce the computation overhead by more than 50% compared to the state-of-the-art method.

Video analytics at mobile edge servers offers significant benefits like reduced response time and enhanced privacy. However, guaranteeing various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of dynamic video analysis requests on heterogeneous edge devices remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a scalable online video analytics scheme, called Novas, which automatically makes precise service configuration adjustments upon constant video content changes. Specifically, Novas leverages the filtered confidence sum and a two-window t-test to online detect accuracy fluctuations without ground truth information. In such cases, Novas efficiently estimates the performance of all potential service configurations through a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based collaborative filtering method. Finally, given the NP-hardness of the optimal scheduling problem, a heuristic scheduling strategy that maximizes the minimum remaining resources is devised to schedule the most suitable configurations to servers for execution. We evaluate the effectiveness of Novas through extensive hybrid experiments conducted on a dedicated testbed. Results show that Novas can achieve a substantial over 27$\times$improvement in satisfying the accuracy requirements compared with existing methods adopting fixed configurations, while ensuring latency requirements. Moreover, Novas improves the goodput of the system by an average of 37.86% compared to existing state-of-the-art scheduling solutions.

Point cloud registration (PCR) can significantly extend the visual field and enhance the point density on distant objects, thereby improving driving safety. However, it is very challenging for vehicles to perform online registration between long-range point clouds. In this paper, we propose an online long-range PCR scheme in VANETs, called LoRaPCR, where vehicles achieve long-range registration through multi-hop short-range highly-accurate registrations. Given the NP-hardness of the problem, a heuristic algorithm is developed to determine best registration paths while leveraging the reuse of registration results to reduce computation costs. Moreover, we utilize an optimized dynamic programming algorithm to determine the transmission routes while minimizing the communication overhead. To the best of our knowledge, LoRaPCR is the first solution to achieve multi-vehicle point cloud long-range registration. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate that LoRaPCR can achieve high PCR accuracy with low relative translation and rotation errors of 0.55 meters and 1.43${}^{\circ }$, respectively, at a distance of over 100 meters, and reduce the computation overhead by more than 50% compared to the state-of-the-art method.

Stream processing systems commonly work with auto-scaling to ensure resource efficiency and quality of service (QoS). Existing auto-scaling solutions lack accuracy in resource allocation because they rely on static QoS-resource models that fail to account for high workload variability and use indirect metrics with much distractive information. Moreover, different types of QoS metrics present different characteristics and thus need individual auto-scaling methods. In this paper, we propose a versatile auto-scaling solution for operator-level parallelism configuration, called AuTraScale+, to meet the throughput, processing-time latency, and event-time latency targets. AuTraScale+ follows the Bayesian optimization framework to make scaling decisions. First, it uses the Gaussian process model to eliminate the negative influence of uncertain factors on the performance model accuracy. Second, it leverages the expected improvement-based (EI-based) acquisition function to search and recommend the optimal configuration quickly. Besides, to make a more accurate scaling decision when the new model is not ready, AuTraScale+ proposes a transfer learning algorithm to estimate the benefits of all configurations at a new rate based on existing models and then recommend the optimal one. We implement and evaluate AuTraScale+ on the Flink platform. The experimental results on three representative workloads demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art methods, AuTraScale+ can reduce 66.6% and 36.7% resource consumption, respectively, in the scale-down and scale-up scenarios while achieving their throughput and processing-time latency targets. Compared with other methods of optimizing event-time latency, AuTraScale+ saves 26.9% of resources on average.

Collaborative edge computing (CEC) is an emerging paradigm enabling sharing of the coupled data, computation, and networking resources among heterogeneous geo-distributed edge nodes. Recently, there has been a trend to orchestrate and schedule containerized application workloads in CEC, while Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard broadly adopted by the industry and academia. However, Kubernetes is not preferable for CEC because its design is not dedicated to edge computing and neglects the unique features of edge nativeness. More specifically, Kubernetes primarily ensures resource provision of workloads while neglecting the performance requirements of edge-native applications, such as throughput and latency. Furthermore, Kubernetes neglects the inner dependencies of edge-native applications and fails to consider data locality and networking resources, leading to inferior performance. In this work, we design and develop ENTS, the first edge-native task scheduling system, to manage the distributed edge resources and facilitate efficient task scheduling to optimize the performance of edge-native applications. ENTS extends Kubernetes with the unique ability to collaboratively schedule computation and networking resources by comprehensively considering job profile and resource status. We showcase the superior efficacy of ENTS with a case study on data streaming applications. We mathematically formulate a joint task allocation and flow scheduling problem that maximizes the job throughput. We design two novel online scheduling algorithms to optimally decide the task allocation, bandwidth allocation, and flow routing policies. The extensive experiments on a real-world edge video analytics application show that ENTS achieves 43% -220% higher average job throughput compared with the state-of-the-art.

The complexity and variability of streaming data have brought a great challenge to the elasticity of the data processing systems. Streaming systems, such as Flink and Storm, need to adapt to the changes of workload with auto-scaling to meet the QoS requirements while saving resources. However, the accuracy of classical models (such as a queueing model) for QoS prediction decreases with the increase of the complexity and variability of streaming data and the resource interference. On the other hand, the indirect metrics used to optimize QoS may not accurately guide resource adjustment. Those problems can easily lead to waste of resources or QoS violation in practice. To solve the above problems, we propose AuTraScale, an automated and transfer learning auto-scaling solution, to determine the appropriate parallelism and resource allocation that meet the latency and throughput targets. AuTraScale uses Bayesian optimization to adapt to the complex relationship between resources and QoS, minimizing the impact of resource interference on the prediction accuracy, and a new metric that measures the performance of operators for accurate optimization. Even when the input data rate changes, it can quickly adjust the parallelism of each operator in response, with a transfer learning algorithm. We have implemented and evaluated AuTraScale on a Flink platform. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art method like DRS and DS2, AuTraScale can reduce 66.6% and 36.7% resource consumption respectively in the scale-down and scale-up scenarios while ensuring QoS requirements, and save 13.5% resource on average when the input data rate changes.

Service discovery protocol (SDP) is one of the fundamental infrastructures in pervasive computing. However, various SDPs differ on service description model, system architecture, deployment network and service discovery mechanism. It is highly necessary to develop a framework that can provide interoperability for multiple SDPs. In this paper, we carry out an empirical study on building a novel interoperable framework called Service CatlogNet Interoperable Framework (SCNIF), focusing on the interoperability evaluation including the completeness, the extensibility, the transparency and the overhead. Although the empirical study is based on SCNIF, we believe the results are valuable to most interoperable frameworks because SCNIF compromises many interoperability techniques and has successfully developed plug-ins for many SDPs and legacy systems.

One of the fundamental properties of any mobile agent system is to allow efficient message delivery among mobile agents. However, the agent mobility introduces complexity in the design of a mobile agent communication protocol. To deal with this problem, we adopt the well-known mailbox based framework and propose an Adaptive Mailbox Based Protocol (AMBP) in order to best suit the network environment and the communication requirements. The experimental results show that our AMBP does behave adaptively and can achieve high performance.

We first propose a generic framework for the design of mobile agent communication protocols. The framework uses a flexible and adaptive mailbox-based scheme that associates each mobile agent with a mailbox while allowing the decoupling between them. This flexible approach allows us to design a variety of protocols which can be made adaptive to specific applications. Based on the framework, we derive a new protocol which possesses good characteristics such as efficiency and adaptability. To improve reliability, we implement the protocol with a fault tolerant architecture that consists of two levels of message passing primitives. Simulation results show that our protocol can effectively handle both network and host failures while keeping the communication cost low.

.Ahlract-Mohile IP is one of the dominating protocols that provide the mohilily support in the Internet. However, even with some proposed optimizntion techniques, there is still space far improving the performance, In this paper, IYC present a novel mnilhns-hnsed scheme to further improve the performance. In this scheme. each mobile node miq-nting to a foreign network is associated with U mailbor. A sender sends packets to the receiver's mailbox, which will in turn foianrd them to the destination. During handuff, a mobile node can decide whether to move its mailbox and rcpnrl the handoff to the home agent, or simply to report the hnndaff to the mailbor. In this way. the scheme is adaptke and can hc made to reduce the workload on the home agent and minimize the total cost of message delivery and mohilily management. To evaluate the performance of the propnsrd schrmr, we develop a performance model considering two walk models for mobile nodes. based on which the cost function is derived We also propnse an iterative algorithm for deriving an optimal point where the cost function reaches its minimum. The results show that our new scheme c m outperform Mobile 1P route optimization with smooth handoff extension, no matter how mnny packets are to he received during each migration.

This paper proposes an adaptive and reliable message delivery protocol for mobile objects. The protocol uses a mailbox-based scheme, which associates each mobile object with a mailbox while allowing the decoupling between them. It provides location-independent message passing and overcome message loss caused by mobile object's mobility. It also reduces the reliance on home location sever and relaxes the constraint on mobile object's mobility. The protocol is suitable for different mobility and communication patterns by choosing different mailbox migration frequency properly. Its applications include mobile agent system, mobile Internet and short message service.

We concern with the design of efficient algorithms for mobile agent communications. We first describe a novel mailbox-based scheme for flexible and adaptive message delivery in mobile agent systems and a specific adaptive protocol derived from the scheme. Then we present the design and verification of a path compression and garbage collection algorithm for improving the performance of the proposed protocol. Simulation results showed that by properly setting some parameters, the algorithm can effectively reduce both the number of location registrations and the communication overhead of each registration. Consequently, the total location registration overhead during the life cycle of a mobile agent is greatly reduced. The algorithm can also be used for clearing useless addresses of mobile agents cached by hosts in the network.