skip to main content


Title: VECMAN: A Framework for Energy-Aware Resource Management in Vehicular Edge Computing Systems
In Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) systems, the computing resources of connected Electric Vehicles (EV) are used to fulfill the low-latency computation requirements of vehicles. However, local execution of heavy workloads may drain a considerable amount of energy in EVs. One promising way to improve the energy efficiency is to share and coordinate computing resources among connected EVs. However, the uncertainties in the future location of vehicles make it hard to decide which vehicles participate in resource sharing and how long they share their resources so that all participants benefit from resource sharing. In this paper, we propose VECMAN, a framework for energy-aware resource management in VEC systems composed of two algorithms: (i) a resource selector algorithm that determines the participating vehicles and the duration of resource sharing period; and (ii) an energy manager algorithm that manages computing resources of the participating vehicles with the aim of minimizing the computational energy consumption. We evaluate the proposed algorithms and show that they considerably reduce the vehicles computational energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, our algorithms achieve between 7% and 18% energy savings compared to a baseline that executes workload locally and an average of 13% energy savings compared to a baseline that offloads vehicles workloads to RSUs.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1948365 1724227
NSF-PAR ID:
10280442
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
ISSN:
1536-1233
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 1
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. The low-latency requirements of connected electric vehicles and their increasing computing needs have led to the necessity to move computational nodes from the cloud data centers to edge nodes such as road-side units (RSU). However, offloading the workload of all the vehicles to RSUs may not scale well to an increasing number of vehicles and workloads. To solve this problem, computing nodes can be installed directly on the smart vehicles, so that each vehicle can execute the heavy workload locally, thus forming a vehicular edge computing system. On the other hand, these computational nodes may drain a considerable amount of energy in electric vehicles. It is therefore important to manage the resources of connected electric vehicles to minimize their energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that manages the computing nodes of connected electric vehicles for minimized energy consumption. The algorithm achieves energy savings for connected electric vehicles by exploiting the discrete settings of computational power for various performance levels. We evaluate the proposed algorithm and show that it considerably reduces the vehicles' computational energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, our algorithm achieves 15-85% energy savings compared to a baseline that executes workload locally and an average of 51% energy savings compared to a baseline that offloads vehicles' workloads only to RSUs. 
    more » « less
  2. Apache Mesos, a two-level resource scheduler, provides resource sharing across multiple users in a multi-tenant clustered environment. Computational resources (i.e., CPU, memory, disk, etc.) are distributed according to the Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) policy. Mesos frameworks (users) receive resources based on their current usage and are responsible for scheduling their tasks within the allocation. We have observed that multiple frameworks can cause fairness imbalance in a multi-user environment. For example, a greedy framework consuming more than its fair share of resources can deny resource fairness to others. The user with the least Dominant Share is considered first by the DRF module to get its resource allocation. However, the default DRF implementation, in Apache Mesos' Master allocation module, does not consider the overall resource demands of the tasks in the queue for each user/framework. This lack of awareness can lead to poor performance as users without any pending task may receive more resource offers, and users with a queue of pending tasks can starve due to their high dominant shares. In a multi-tenant environment, the characteristics of frameworks and workloads must be understood by cluster managers to be able to define fairness based on not only resource share but also resource demand and queue wait time. We have developed a policy driven queue manager, Tromino, for an Apache Mesos cluster where tasks for individual frameworks can be scheduled based on each framework's overall resource demands and current resource consumption. Dominant Share and demand awareness of Tromino and scheduling based on these attributes can reduce (1) the impact of unfairness due to a framework specific configuration, and (2) unfair waiting time due to higher resource demand in a pending task queue. In the best case, Tromino can significantly reduce the average waiting time of a framework by using the proposed Demand-DRF aware policy. 
    more » « less
  3. Mobile devices such as drones and autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on object detection (OD) through deep neural networks (DNNs) to perform critical tasks such as navigation, target-tracking and surveillance, just to name a few. Due to their high complexity, the execution of these DNNs requires excessive time and energy. Low-complexity object tracking (OT) is thus used along with OD, where the latter is periodically applied to generate "fresh" references for tracking. However, the frames processed with OD incur large delays, which does not comply with real-time applications requirements. Offloading OD to edge servers can mitigate this issue, but existing work focuses on the optimization of the offloading process in systems where the wireless channel has a very large capacity. Herein, we consider systems with constrained and erratic channel capacity, and establish parallel OT (at the mobile device) and OD (at the edge server) processes that are resilient to large OD latency. We propose Katch-Up, a novel tracking mechanism that improves the system resilience to excessive OD delay. We show that this technique greatly improves the quality of the reference available to tracking, and boosts performance up to 33%. However, while Katch-Up significantly improves performance, it also increases the computing load of the mobile device. Hence, we design SmartDet, a low-complexity controller based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that learns to achieve the right trade-off between resource utilization and OD performance. SmartDet takes as input highly-heterogeneous context-related information related to the current video content and the current network conditions to optimize frequency and type of OD offloading, as well as Katch-Up utilization. We extensively evaluate SmartDet on a real-world testbed composed by a JetSon Nano as mobile device and a GTX 980 Ti as edge server, connected through a Wi-Fi link, to collect several network-related traces, as well as energy measurements. We consider a state-of-the-art video dataset (ILSVRC 2015 - VID) and state-of-the-art OD models (EfficientDet 0, 2 and 4). Experimental results show that SmartDet achieves an optimal balance between tracking performance – mean Average Recall (mAR) and resource usage. With respect to a baseline with full Katch-Up usage and maximum channel usage, we still increase mAR by 4% while using 50% less of the channel and 30% power resources associated with Katch-Up. With respect to a fixed strategy using minimal resources, we increase mAR by 20% while using Katch-Up on 1/3 of the frames. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Recent advances in computing algorithms and hardware have rekindled interest in developing high-accuracy, low-cost surrogate models for simulating physical systems. The idea is to replace expensive numerical integration of complex coupled partial differential equations at fine time scales performed on supercomputers, with machine-learned surrogates that efficiently and accurately forecast future system states using data sampled from the underlying system. One particularly popular technique being explored within the weather and climate modelling community is the echo state network (ESN), an attractive alternative to other well-known deep learning architectures. Using the classical Lorenz 63 system, and the three tier multi-scale Lorenz 96 system (Thornes T, Duben P, Palmer T. 2017 Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 143 , 897–908. ( doi:10.1002/qj.2974 )) as benchmarks, we realize that previously studied state-of-the-art ESNs operate in two distinct regimes, corresponding to low and high spectral radius (LSR/HSR) for the sparse, randomly generated, reservoir recurrence matrix. Using knowledge of the mathematical structure of the Lorenz systems along with systematic ablation and hyperparameter sensitivity analyses, we show that state-of-the-art LSR-ESNs reduce to a polynomial regression model which we call Domain-Driven Regularized Regression (D2R2). Interestingly, D2R2 is a generalization of the well-known SINDy algorithm (Brunton SL, Proctor JL, Kutz JN. 2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113 , 3932–3937. ( doi:10.1073/pnas.1517384113 )). We also show experimentally that LSR-ESNs (Chattopadhyay A, Hassanzadeh P, Subramanian D. 2019 ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08829 )) outperform HSR ESNs (Pathak J, Hunt B, Girvan M, Lu Z, Ott E. 2018 Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 , 024102. ( doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.024102 )) while D2R2 dominates both approaches. A significant goal in constructing surrogates is to cope with barriers to scaling in weather prediction and simulation of dynamical systems that are imposed by time and energy consumption in supercomputers. Inexact computing has emerged as a novel approach to helping with scaling. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three models (LSR-ESN, HSR-ESN and D2R2) by varying the precision or word size of the computation as our inexactness-controlling parameter. For precisions of 64, 32 and 16 bits, we show that, surprisingly, the least expensive D2R2 method yields the most robust results and the greatest savings compared to ESNs. Specifically, D2R2 achieves 68 × in computational savings, with an additional 2 × if precision reductions are also employed, outperforming ESN variants by a large margin. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Machine learning for weather and climate modelling’. 
    more » « less
  5. Recently, with the advent of the Internet of everything and 5G network, the amount of data generated by various edge scenarios such as autonomous vehicles, smart industry, 4K/8K, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), etc., has greatly exploded. All these trends significantly brought real-time, hardware dependence, low power consumption, and security requirements to the facilities, and rapidly popularized edge computing. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) workloads also changed the computing paradigm from cloud services to mobile applications dramatically. Different from wide deployment and sufficient study of AI in the cloud or mobile platforms, AI workload performance and their resource impact on edges have not been well understood yet. There lacks an in-depth analysis and comparison of their advantages, limitations, performance, and resource consumptions in an edge environment. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of representative AI workloads on edge platforms. We first conduct a summary of modern edge hardware and popular AI workloads. Then we quantitatively evaluate three categories (i.e., classification, image-to-image, and segmentation) of the most popular and widely used AI applications in realistic edge environments based on Raspberry Pi, Nvidia TX2, etc. We find that interaction between hardware and neural network models incurs non-negligible impact and overhead on AI workloads at edges. Our experiments show that performance variation and difference in resource footprint limit availability of certain types of workloads and their algorithms for edge platforms, and users need to select appropriate workload, model, and algorithm based on requirements and characteristics of edge environments. 
    more » « less