Heterogeneous Online Learning for “Thing-Adaptive” Fog Computing in IoT
Tianyi Chen, Qing Hua Ling, Yanning Shen, Georgios B. Giannakis · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2018
Internet of Things (IoT) is featured with its seamless connectivity of billions of smart devices, which offer different functionalities and serve various personalized tasks. To meet the task-specific requirements such as latency and privacy, the fog computing emerges to extend cloud computing services to the edge of the Internet backbone. This paper deals withonline fog computingemerging in IoT, where the goal is to balance computation and communication at fog networks on-the-fly to minimize service latency. Due to heterogeneous devices and human participation in IoT, the online decisions here need to flexibly adapt to the temporally unpredictable user demands and availability of fog resources. By generalizing the classic online convex optimization (OCO) framework, the low-latency fog computing task is first formulated as an OCO problem involving both time-varying loss functions and time-varying constraints. These constraints are revealed after making decisions, and allow instantaneous violations yet they must be satisfied in the long term. Tailored for heterogeneous tasks in IoT, a “thing-adaptive” online saddle-point (TAOSP) scheme is developed, which automatically adjusts the stepsize to offer desirabletask-specificlearning rates. It is established that without prior knowledge of the time-varying parameters, TAOSP simultaneously yields near-optimality and feasibility, provided that the best dynamic solutions vary slowly over time. Numerical tests corroborate that our novel approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in minimizing network latency.