Agile Services Provisioning for Learning-Based Applications in Fog Computing Networks

Fog computing has emerged as a promising solution for service provisioning. To support the increasing number of smart end devices and their requirement for intelligent data processing, numerous learning-based applications will be deployed at the edge network to provide services with an acceptable level of latency. However, such applications assume that the training and the actual data are independent and identically distributed, which is impractical in the dynamic and heterogeneous environment of the real world. This makes service matchmaking a challenge because even if the service functionality matches user requirements, the mismatched actual data will inevitably result in the degradation of service quality. This paper targets the mismatching issue of learning-based applications and the high requirement of intelligent data processing at the network edge and proposes a novel service provisioning model. This model introduces a novel service description model to resolve data mismatch, a clustering algorithm that pre-processes requests to deal with high concurrency requirements, and a heuristic joint service searching method to reduce traffic costs. This work was evaluated through a case study and simulations. Evaluation results show that the proposed model can achieve a good quality of services and reduce response time as well as traffic costs.