Anousheh Gholami was a former Research Intern in the Integrated Systems Group at NEC Laboratories America, Inc., while studying at University of Maryland.

Posts

Application-specific, Dynamic Reservation of 5G Compute and Network Resources by using Reinforcement Learning

5G services and applications explicitly reserve compute and network resources in today’s complex and dynamic infrastructure of multi-tiered computing and cellular networking to ensure application-specific service quality metrics, and the infrastructure providers charge the 5G services for the resources reserved. A static, one-time reservation of resources at service deployment typically results in extended periods of under-utilization of reserved resources during the lifetime of the service operation. This is due to a plethora of reasons like changes in content from the IoT sensors (for example, change in number of people in the field of view of a camera) or a change in the environmental conditions around the IoT sensors (for example, time of the day, rain or fog can affect data acquisition by sensors). Under-utilization of a specific resource like compute can also be due to temporary inadequate availability of another resource like the network bandwidth in a dynamic 5G infrastructure. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning-based online method to dynamically adjust an application’s compute and network resource reservations to minimize under-utilization of requested resources, while ensuring acceptable service quality metrics. We observe that a complex application-specific coupling exists between the compute and network usage of an application. Our proposed method learns this coupling during the operation of the service, and dynamically modulates the compute and network resource requests to mimimize under-utilization of reserved resources. Through experimental evaluation using real-world video analytics application, we show that our technique is able to capture complex compute-network coupling relationship in an online manner i.e. while the application is running, and dynamically adapts and saves up to 65% compute and 93% network resources on average (over multiple runs), without significantly impacting application accuracy.

ROMA: Resource Orchestration for Microservices-based 5G Applications

With the growth of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and cloud computing technologies, the infrastructure (compute and network) available to emerging applications (AR/VR, autonomous driving, industry 4.0, etc.) has become quite complex. There are multiple tiers of computing (IoT devices, near edge, far edge, cloud, etc.) that are connected with different types of networking technologies (LAN, LTE, 5G, MAN, WAN, etc.). Deployment and management of applications in such an environment is quite challenging. In this paper, we propose ROMA, which performs resource orchestration for microservices-based 5G applications in a dynamic, heterogeneous, multi-tiered compute and network fabric. We assume that only application-level requirements are known, and the detailed requirements of the individual microservices in the application are not specified. As part of our solution, ROMA identifies and leverages the coupling relationship between compute and network usage for various microservices and solves an optimization problem in order to appropriately identify how each microservice should be deployed in the complex, multi-tiered compute and network fabric, so that the end-to-end application requirements are optimally met. We implemented two real-world 5G applications in video surveillance and intelligent transportation system (ITS) domains. Through extensive experiments, we show that ROMA is able to save up to 90%, 55% and 44% compute and up to 80%, 95% and 75% network bandwidth for the surveillance (watchlist) and transportation application (person and car detection), respectively. This improvement is achieved while honoring the application performance requirements, and it is over an alternative scheme that employs a static and overprovisioned resource allocation strategy by ignoring the resource coupling relationships.