The development of information technology has brought great convenience to our lives, but at the same time, the unfairness and privacy issues brought about by traditional centralized systems cannot be ignored. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer and decentralized ledger technology that has the characteristics of transparency, consistency, traceability and fairness, but it reveals private information in some scenarios. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) guarantees enhanced privacy and correctness, so many researchers have been trying to combine secure MPC with blockchain to deal with privacy and trust issues. In this paper, we used homomorphic encryption, secret sharing and zero-knowledge proofs to construct a publicly verifiable secure MPC protocol consisting of two parts—an on-chain computation phase and an off-chain preprocessing phase—and we integrated the protocol as part of the chaincode in Hyperledger Fabric to protect the privacy of transaction data. Experiments showed that our solution performed well on a permissioned blockchain. Most of the time taken to complete the protocol was spent on communication, so the performance has a great deal of room to grow.

The proliferation of mobile devices and ubiquitous access of the wireless network enable many new mobile applications such as augmented reality, mobile gaming and so on. As the applications are latency sensitive, researchers propose to offload the complex computations of these applications to the nearby edge cloud, in order to reduce the latency. Existing works mostly consider the problem of partitioning the computations between the mobile device and the traditional cloud that has abundant resources. The proposed approaches can not be applied in the context of mobile edge cloud, because both the resources in the mobile edge cloud and the wireless access bandwidth to the edge cloud are constrained. In this paper, we study joint computation partitioning and resource allocation problem for latency sensitive applications in mobile edge clouds. The problem is novel in that we combine the computation partitioning and the two-dimensional resource allocations in both the computation resources and the network bandwidth. We develop a new and efficient method, namely Multi-Dimensional Search and Adjust (MDSA), which is an offline algorithm, to solve the problem. We compare MDSA with the classic list scheduling method and the SearchAdjust algorithm via comprehensive simulations. The results show that MDSA outperforms the benchmark algorithms in terms of the overall application latency. Moreover, we also design an online method, named by Cooperative Online Scheduling (COS), which can be easily deployed in practical systems. By extensive evaluations, we show that COS outperforms the benchmark methods by 25% on average.

An information dissemination network (i.e., a cascade) with a dynamic graph structure is formed when a novel idea or message spreads from person to person. Predicting the growth of cascades is one of the fundamental problems in social network analysis. Existing deep learning models for cascade prediction are primarily based on recurrent neural networks and representation on random walks or propagation paths. However, these models are not sufficient for learning the deep spatial and temporal features of an entire cascade. Therefore, a new model, called Cascade2vec, is proposed to learn the dynamic graph representation of cascades based on graph recurrent neural networks. To learn more effective graph-level representation of cascades, the current graph neural networks are improved by designing a graph residual block, which shares attention weights between nodes, and by transforming features through perception layers. Furthermore, the proposed graph neural network is integrated into a recurrent neural network to learn the temporal features between graphs. With this method, both the spatial and temporal characteristics of cascades are learned in Cascade2vec. The experimental results show that our method significantly reduces the mean squared logarithmic error and median squared logarithmic error by 16.1% and 12%, respectively, in the cascade prediction at one hour in the Microblog network dataset compared with strong baselines.

Federated Learning (FL) has been widely used for distributed machine learning in edge computing. In FL, the model parameters are iteratively aggregated from the clients to a central server, which is inclined to be the communication bottleneck and single point of failure. To solve these drawbacks, hierarchical model training frameworks like Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) and E-Tree learning have been proposed. One of the most challenging problems in the hierarchical model training framework is optimizing the aggregation frequencies of the edge devices at various levels. Because, in an edge computing environment, heterogeneity in the resource can introduce synchronization delays caused by waiting for slow workers and significantly impact the training performance. This paper tackles the problem with weak synchronization where edge devices on the same level have different frequencies on local updates and/or model aggregations. Existing works based on weak synchronization lack solutions to quantitatively determine the aggregation frequencies of each edge device. Thus, we propose a resource-based aggregation frequency controlling method, termed RAF, which determines the optimal aggregation frequencies of edge devices to minimize the loss function according to heterogeneous resources. Our proposed method can alleviate the waiting time and fully utilize the resources of the edge devices. Besides, RAF dynamically adjusts the aggregation frequencies at different phases during the model training to achieve fast convergence speed and high accuracy. We evaluated the performance of RAF via extensive experiments with real datasets on our self-developed edge computing testbed. Evaluation results demonstrate that RAF outperforms the benchmark approaches in terms of learning accuracy and convergence speed.