Data-Driven Online Resource Allocation for User Experience Improvement in Mobile Edge Clouds

As the cloud is pushed to the edge of the network, resource allocation for user experience improvement in mobile edge clouds (MEC) is increasingly important and faces multiple challenges. This paper studies quality of experience (QoE)-oriented resource allocation in MEC while considering user diversity, limited resources, and the complex relationship between allocated resources and user experience. We introduce a closed-loop online resource allocation (CORA) framework to tackle this problem. It learns the objective function of resource allocation from the historical dataset and updates the learned model using the online testing results. Due to the learned objective model is typically non-convex and challenging to solve in real-time, we leverage the Lyapunov optimization to decouple the long-term average constraint and apply the prime-dual method to solve this decoupled resource allocation problem. Thereafter, we put forth a data-driven optimal online queue resource allocation (OOQRA) algorithm and a data-driven robust OQRA (ROQRA) algorithm for homogenous and heterogeneous user cases, respectively. Moreover, we provide a rigorous convergence analysis for the OOQRA algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithms using the synthesis and YouTube datasets. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the user complaint rate is reduced by up to 100% and 18% in the synthesis and YouTube datasets, respectively.

From Learning to Analytics: Improving Model Efficacy with Goal-Directed Client Selection

Federated learning (FL) is an appealing paradigm for learning a global model among distributed clients while preserving data privacy. Driven by the demand for high-quality user experiences, evaluating the well-trained global model after the FL process is crucial. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop model analytics framework that allows for effective evaluation of the trained global model using clients' local data. To address the challenges posed by system and data heterogeneities in the FL process, we study a goal-directed client selection problem based on the model analytics framework by selecting a subset of clients for the model training. This problem is formulated as a stochastic multi-armed bandit (SMAB) problem. We first put forth a quick initial upper confidence bound (Quick-Init UCB) algorithm to solve this SMAB problem under the federated analytics (FA) framework. Then, we further propose a belief propagation-based UCB (BP-UCB) algorithm under the democratized analytics (DA) framework. Moreover, we derive two regret upper bounds for the proposed algorithms, which increase logarithmically over the time horizon. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve nearly optimal performance, with a gap of less than 1.44% and 3.12% under the FA and DA frameworks, respectively.