Chao-Lun Wu, Te-Chuan Chiu, Chih-Yu Wang, Ai-Chun Pang
Mobility-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning with Glimpse Mobility Prediction in Edge Computing
IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
June 2020
Mobile/multi-access edge computing (MEC) is therefore developed to support the upcoming AI-aware mobile services, which require low latency and intensive computation resources at the edge of the network. One of the most challenging issues in MEC is service provision with mobility consideration. It has been known that the offloading and migration decision need to be jointly handled to maximize the utility of networks within the latency constraints, which is challenging when users are in mobility. In this paper, we propose Mobility-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning (M-DRL) framework for mobile service provision problems in the MEC system. M-DRL is composed of two parts: DRL specialized in supporting multiple users joint training, and glimpse, a seq2seq model customized for mobility prediction to predict a sequence of locations just like a "glimpse" of future. Through integrating the proposed DRL and glimpse mobility prediction model, the proposed M-DRL framework is optimized to handle the service provision problem in MEC with acceptable computation complexity and near optimal performance.
Po-Yu Chou, Wei-Yu Chen, Chih-Yu Wang, Ren-Hung Hwang, Wen-Tsuen Chen
Deep Reinforcement Learning for MEC Streaming with Joint User Association and Resource Management
IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
June 2020
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising technique in the 5G Era to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for online video streaming due to its ability to reduce the backhaul transmission by caching certain content. However, it still takes effort to address the user association and video quality selection problem under the limited resource of MEC to fully support the low-latency demand for live video streaming. We found the optimization problem to be a non-linear integer programming, which is impossible to obtain a globally optimal solution under polynomial time. In this paper, we first reformulate this problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and develop a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) based algorithm exploiting the supply-demand interpretation of the Lagrange dual problem. Simulation results show that our proposed approach achieves significant QoE improvement especially in the low wireless resource and high user number scenario compared to other baselines.
Yi-Hsuan Hung, Chih-Yu Wang, Ren-Hung Hwang
Optimizing Social Welfare of Live Video Streaming Services in Mobile Edge Computing
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
April 2020
The live video streaming services have been suffered from the limited backhaul capacity of the cellular core network and occasional congestions due to the cloud-based architecture. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) brings the services from the centralized cloud to nearby network edge to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) of cloud services, such as live video streaming services. Nevertheless, the resource at edge devices is still limited and should be allocated economically efficiently. In this paper, we propose Edge Combinatorial Clock Auction (ECCA) and Combinatorial Clock Auction in Stream (CCAS), two auction frameworks to improve the QoE of live video streaming services in the Edge-enabled cellular system. The edge system is the auctioneer who decides the backhaul capacity and caching space allocation and streamers are the bidders who request for the backhaul capacity and caching space to improve the video quality their audiences can watch. There are two key subproblems: the caching space value evaluations and allocations. We show that both problems can be solved by the proposed dynamic programming algorithms. The truth-telling property is guaranteed in both ECCA and CCAS. The simulation results show that the overall system utility can be significantly improved through the proposed system.
Boyu Lu, Jun-Cheng Chen, Rama Chellappa
UID-GAN: Unsupervised Image Deblurring via Disentangled Representations
IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science
January 2020
Recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) have significantly improved the performance of single image blind deblurring algorithms. However, most of the existing algorithms require paired training data. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method for single-image deblurring without paired training images. We introduce a disentangled framework to split the content and blur features of a blurred image, which yields improved deblurring performance. To handle the unpaired training data, a blurring branch and the cycle-consistency loss are added to guarantee that the content structures of the restored results match the original images. We also add a perceptual loss to further mitigate the artifacts. For natural image deblurring, we introduce a color loss to reduce color distortions in outputs. Extensive experiments on both domain-specific and natural image deblurring show the proposed method achieves competitive results compared to recent state-of-the-art deblurring approaches.
Zhan-Lun Chang, Chun-Yen Lee, Chia-Hung Lin, Chih-Yu Wang, Hung-Yu Wei
Game-Theoretic Intrusion Prevention System Deployment for Mobile Edge Computing
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
December 2021
The network attack such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack could be critical to latency-critical systems such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) as such attacks significantly increase the response delay of the victim service. Intrusion prevention system (IPS) is a promising solution to defend against such attacks, but there will be a trade-off between IPS deployment and application resource reservation as the deployment of IPS will reduce the number of computation resources for MEC applications. In this paper, we proposed a game-theoretic framework to study the joint computation resource allocation and IPS deployment in the MEC architecture. We study the pricing strategy of the MEC platform operator and purchase strategy of the application service provider, given the expected attack strength and end user demands. The best responses of both MPO and ASPs are derived theoretically to identify the Stackelberg equilibrium. The simulation results confirm that the proposed solutions significantly increase the social welfare of the system.
Yu-Tai Lin, Yu-Cheng Hsiao, Chih-Yu Wang
Enabling Mobile Edge Computing for Battery-less Intermittent IoT Devices
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
December 2021
Intermittent computing enables battery-less systems to support complex tasks such as face recognition through energy harvesting, but without an installed battery. Nevertheless, the latency may not be satisfied due to the limited computing power. Integrating mobile edge computing (MEC) with intermittent computing would be the desired solution to reduce latency and increase computation efficiency. In this work, we investigate the joint optimization problem of bandwidth allocation and the computation offloading with multiple battery-less intermittent devices in a wireless MEC network. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the expected offloading efficiency, and then propose Greedy Adaptive Balanced Allocation and Offloading (GABAO) algorithm considering the energy arrival distributions, remaining task load, and available computing/communication resources. Simulation results show that the proposed system can significantly reduce the latency in a multi-user MEC network with battery-less devices.
Juan Sebastián Gomez-Cañón, Estefanía Cano, Tuomas Eerola, Perfecto Herrera, Xiao Hu, Yi-Hsuan Yang, And Emilia Gómez
Music Emotion Recognition: Towards new robust standards in personalized and context-sensitive applications
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
November 2021
Emotion is one of the main reasons why people engage and interact with music [1] . Songs can express our inner feelings, produce goosebumps, bring us to tears, share an emotional state with a composer or performer, or trigger specific memories. Interest in a deeper understanding of the relationship between music and emotion has motivated researchers from various areas of knowledge for decades [2] , including computational researchers. Imagine an algorithm capable of predicting the emotions that a listener perceives in a musical piece, or one that dynamically generates music that adapts to the mood of a conversation in a film—a particularly fascinating and provocative idea. These algorithms typify music emotion recognition (MER), a computational task that attempts to automatically recognize either the emotional content in music or the emotions induced by music to the listener [3] . To do so, emotionally relevant features are extracted from music. The features are processed, evaluated, and then associated with certain emotions. MER is one of the most challenging high-level music description problems in music information retrieval (MIR), an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on the development of computational systems to help humans better understand music collections. MIR integrates concepts and methodologies from several disciplines, including music theory, music psychology, neuroscience, signal processing, and machine learning.
Hashan Roshantha Mendis, Chih-Kai Kang, And Pi-Cheng Hsiu
Intermittent-Aware Neural Architecture Search
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
September 2021
The increasing paradigm shift towards intermittent computing has made it possible to intermittently execute deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices powered by ambient energy. Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) techniques have achieved great success in automatically finding DNNs with high accuracy and low inference latency on the deployed hardware. We make a key observation, where NAS attempts to improve inference latency by primarily maximizing data reuse, but the derived solutions when deployed on intermittently-powered systems may be inefficient, such that the inference may not satisfy an end-to-end latency requirement and, more seriously, they may be unsafe given an insufficient energy budget. This work proposes iNAS, which introduces intermittent execution behavior into NAS to find accurate network architectures with corresponding execution designs, which can safely and efficiently execute under intermittent power. An intermittent-aware execution design explorer is presented, which finds the right balance between data reuse and the costs related to intermittent inference, and incorporates a preservation design search space into NAS, while ensuring the power-cycle energy budget is not exceeded. To assess an intermittent execution design, an intermittent-aware abstract performance model is presented, which formulates the key costs related to progress preservation and recovery during intermittent inference. We implement iNAS on top of an existing NAS framework and evaluate their respective solutions found for various datasets, energy budgets and latency requirements, on a Texas Instruments device. Compared to those NAS solutions that can safely complete the inference, the iNAS solutions reduce the intermittent inference latency by 60% on average while achieving comparable accuracy, with an average 7% increase in search overhead.
Zhan-Lun Chang, Chih-Yu Wang, Hung-Yu Wei
Flat-rate Pricing and Truthful Workload Allocation Mechanism in Multi-Layer Edge Computing
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
September 2021
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm to ease the computation burden of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices by leveraging computing capabilities at the network edge. With the yearning needs for resource provision from IoT devices, the queueing delay at the edge nodes not only poses a colossal impediment to achieving satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) for the IoT devices but also to the benefits of the edge nodes owing to escalating energy expenditure. Moreover, since the service providers may differ, computationally competent entities’ computing services should entail economic compensation for the incurred energy expenditure and the capital investment. Therefore, the workload allocation mechanism, where we consider flat-rate and dynamic pricing schemes in the multi-layer edge computing structure, is much-needed. We use Stackelberg game to capture the inherent hierarchy and interdependence between the second-layer edge node (SLEN) and first-layer edge nodes (FLENs). A truthful admission control mechanism grounded on the optimal workload allocation is designed for FLENs without violating end-to-end (E2E) latency requirements. We prove that a Stackelberg equilibrium with the E2E latency guarantee and truthfulness exists and can be reached through proposed algorithm. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our scheme and illustrate several insights.
Wei-Ming Chen, Tei-Wei Kuo, And Pi-Cheng Hsiu
Heterogeneity-aware Multicore Synchronization for Intermittent Systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
September 2021
Intermittent systems enable batteryless devices to operate through energy harvesting by leveraging the complementary characteristics of volatile (VM) and non-volatile memory (NVM). Unfortunately, alternate and frequent accesses to heterogeneous memories for accumulative execution across power cycles can significantly hinder computation progress. The progress impediment is mainly due to more CPU time being wasted for slow NVM accesses than for fast VM accesses. This paper explores how to leverage heterogeneous cores to mitigate the progress impediment caused by heterogeneous memories. In particular, a delegable and adaptive synchronization protocol is proposed to allow memory accesses to be delegated between cores and to dynamically adapt to diverse memory access latency. Moreover, our design guarantees task serializability across multiple cores and maintains data consistency despite frequent power failures. We integrated our design into FreeRTOS running on a Cypress device featuring heterogeneous dual cores and hybrid memories. Experimental results show that, compared to recent approaches that assume single-core intermittent systems, our design can improve computation progress at least 1.8x and even up to 33.9x by leveraging core heterogeneity.