With the recent advances in mobile sensing, computing, and communication technologies, mobile cyber–physical systems (MCPSs) become a promising networking paradigm that provides mobile users with various applications and services from cyber space to the physical world. One of the main challenges in the MCPSs is to defend security threats launched by adversaries. Exploiting security services to defend threats is energy consuming, whereas the energy of mobile devices is generally limited since most of mobile devices are battery powered. This necessitates the need to design new methodologies to tackle the tradeoff between security and energy of MCPSs. To this end, this article aims to maximize MCPSs’ security under the constraints of energy and deadline. In this article, we first formulate the MCPS security maximization problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem and then transform it into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem without performance degradation. To solve the transformed MILP problem efficiently, we propose a decomposed algorithm to derive the optimum task scheduling solution instead of using MILP solvers that may be very time consuming for MCPSs of large granularity. The derived task scheduling solution decides the assignment, operating frequency, execution order, as well as security service selection for all tasks. We implement a series of simulation-based experiments to validate the proposed decomposed task scheduling scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme increases system security level by 20.38% and 65.11% on average as compared to a state-of-art approach and a baseline method.

Heterogeneous multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) are suitable platforms for real-time embedded applications that require powerful parallel processing capability as well as low power consumption. For such applications, soft-error reliability (SER) due to transient faults and lifetime reliability (LTR) due to permanent faults are both key concerns. There have been several efforts in the literature oriented toward related reliability problems. However, most existing techniques only concentrate on improving one of the two reliability metrics, which are not suitable for embedded systems deployed in critical applications in need of a long lifetime as well as a reliable execution. This article develops a novel heterogeneous earliest-finish-time (HEFT)-based algorithm to maximize SER and LTR simultaneously under the real-time constraint for dependent tasks executing on heterogeneous MPSoC systems. More specifically, a new deadline-constrained reliability-aware HEFT algorithm, namely DRHEFT, is proposed, which seeks for the best SER–LTR tradeoff solutions through using fuzzy dominance to evaluate the relative fitness values of candidate solutions. The extensive experiments on real-life benchmarks as well as synthetic applications demonstrate that DRHEFT is capable of achieving better SER–LTR tradeoff solutions with higher hypervolume and less computation cost when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Maximizing profit is a key goal for cloud service providers in the modern cloud business market. Service revenue and business cost are two major factors in determining profit and highly depend on multiserver configuration. Understanding the relationship between multiserver configuration and profit is important to service providers. Although existing articles have explored this issue, few of them consider deadline miss rate and soft error reliability of cloud services in multiserver configuration for profit maximization. Since deadline misses violate cloud services’ real-time requirements and soft error prevents successful processing of cloud services, it is necessary to consider the impact of deadline miss rate and soft error reliability on service providers’ profits when configuring the multiserver. This article introduces a deadline miss rate and soft error reliability aware multiserver configuration scheme for maximizing cloud service providers’ profit. Specifically, we derive the deadline miss rate considering the heterogeneity of cloud service requests, and propose an analytical method to compute the soft error reliability of multiserver systems. Based on the new deadline miss rate and soft error reliability models, we formulate the multiserver configuration optimization problem and introduce an augmented Lagrange multiplier-based iterative method to find the optimal multiserver configuration. Extensive experiments evaluate the efficacy of the proposed multiserver configuration approach. Compared with the two state-of-the-art methods, the profit gained by our scheme can be up to 11.92% higher.