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1. STOIC: Serverless TeleOperable Hybrid Cloud for Machine Learning Applications on Edge Device

   Zhang, M; Krintz, C; Wolski, R. (March 2020, International Workshop on Smart Edge Computing and Networking)

   Serverless computing is a promising new event- driven programming model that was designed by cloud vendors to expedite the development and deployment of scalable web services on cloud computing systems. Using the model, developers write applications that consist of simple, independent, stateless functions that the cloud invokes on-demand (i.e. elastically), in response to system-wide events (data arrival, messages, web requests, etc.). In this work, we present STOIC (Serverless TeleOperable HybrId Cloud), an application scheduling and deployment system that extends the serverless model in two ways. First, it uses the model in a distributed setting and schedules application functions across multiple cloud systems. Second, STOIC sup- ports serverless function execution using hardware acceleration (e.g. GPU resources) when available from the underlying cloud system. We overview the design and implementation of STOIC and empirically evaluate it using real-world machine learning applications and multi-tier (e.g. edge-cloud) deployments. We find that STOIC’s combined use of edge and cloud resources is able to outperform using either cloud in isolation for the applications and datasets that we consider. 

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2. Assessing and Mitigating Heterogeneity-Driven Security Threats in the Cloud

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3746228  

   Fang, Chongzhou; Nazari, Najmeh; Omidi, Behnam; Wang, Han; Puri, Aditya; Arora, Manish; Rafatirad, Setareh; Homayoun, Houman; Khasawneh, Khaled (November 2025, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology)

   Cloud computing has become crucial for the commercial world due to its computational capacity, storage capabilities, scalability, software integration, and billing convenience. Initially, clouds were relatively homogeneous, but now diverse machine configurations in heterogeneous clouds are recognized for their improved application performance and energy efficiency. This shift is driven by the integration of various hardware to accommodate diverse user applications. However, alongside these advancements, security threats like micro-architectural attacks are increasing concerns for cloud providers and users. Studies like Repttack and Cloak & Co-locate highlight the vulnerability of heterogeneous clouds to co-location attacks, where attacker and victim instances are placed together. The ease of these attacks isn’t solely linked to heterogeneity but also correlates with how heterogeneous the target systems are. Despite this, no numerical metrics exist to quantify cloud heterogeneity. This article introduces the Heterogeneity Score (HeteroScore) to evaluate server setups and instances. HeteroScore significantly correlates with co-location attack security. The article also proposes strategies to balance diversity and security. This study pioneers the quantitative analysis connecting cloud heterogeneity and infrastructure security. 

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3. Energy-efficient Joint Wireless Charging and Computation Offloading In MEC Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTSP.2021.3098963  

   Malik, Rafia; Vu, Mai (July 2021, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing)

   null (Ed.)

   Wireless charging coupled with computation offloading in edge networks offers a promising solution for realizing power-hungry and computation intensive applications on user devices. We consider a mutil-access edge computing (MEC) system with collocated MEC servers and base-stations/access points (BS/AP) supporting multiple users requesting data computation and wireless charging. We propose an integrated solution for wireless charging with computation offloading to satisfy the largest feasible proportion of requested wireless charging while keeping the total energy consumption at the minimum, subject to the MEC-AP transmit power and latency constraints. We propose a novel nested algorithm to jointly perform data partitioning, time allocation, transmit power control and design the optimal energy beamforming for wireless charging. Our resource allocation scheme offers a minimal energy consumption solution compared to other schemes while also delivering a higher amount of wirelessly transferred charge to the users. Even with data offloading, our proposed solution shows significant charging performance, comparable to the case of charging alone, hence showing the effectiveness of performing partial offloading jointly with wireless charging. 

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4. Edge-Adaptable Serverless Acceleration for Machine Learning IoT Applications

   https://doi.org/DOI 10.1002/spe.2944  

   Zhang, M; Krintz, C.; Wolski, R. (December 2020, Software practice experience)

   Serverless computing is an emerging event-driven programming model that accelerates the development and deployment of scalable web services on cloud computing systems. Though widely integrated with the public cloud, serverless computing use is nascent for edge-based, IoT deployments. In this work, we design and develop STOIC (Serverless TeleOperable HybrId Cloud), an IoT application deployment and offloading system that extends the serverless model in three ways. First, STOIC adopts a dynamic feedback control mechanism to precisely predict latency and dispatch workloads uniformly across edge and cloud systems using a distributed serverless framework. Second, STOIC leverages hardware acceleration (e.g. GPU resources) for serverless function execution when available from the underlying cloud system. Third, STOIC can be configured in multiple ways to overcome deployment variability associated with public cloud use. Finally, we empirically evaluate STOIC using real-world machine learning applications and multi-tier IoT deployments (edge and cloud). We show that STOIC can be used for training image processing workloads (for object recognition) – once thought too resource intensive for edge deployments. We find that STOIC reduces overall execution time (response latency) and achieves placement accuracy that ranges from 92% to 97%. 

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5. Joint Participant Selection and Learning Scheduling for Multi-Model Federated Edge Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MASS56207.2022.00081  

   Wei, Xinliang; Liu, Jiyao; Wang, Yu (October 2022, 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS))

   As edge computing complements the cloud to enable computational services right at the network edge, federated learning (FL) can also benefit from close-by edge computing infrastructure. However, most prior works on federated edge learning (FEL) mainly focus on one shared global model during the federated training in edge systems. In a real edge computing scenario, there may co-exist multiple various FL models that are owned by different entities and used by different applications. Simultaneously training these models competes both computing and networking resources in the shared edge system. Therefore, in this work, we consider a multi-model federated edge learning where multiple FEL models are being trained in the edge network and edge servers can act as either parameter servers or workers of these FEL models. We formulate a joint participant selection and learning scheduling problem, which is a non-linear mixed-integer program, aiming to minimize the total cost of all FEL models while satisfying the desired convergence rate of trained FEL models and the constrained edge resources. We then design several algorithms by decoupling the original problem into two or three sub-problems which can be solved respectively and iteratively. Extensive simulations with real-world training datasets and FEL models show that our proposed algorithms can efficiently reduce the average total cost of all FEL models in a multi-model FEL setting compared with existing algorithms. 

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