In the edge computing (EC) environment, edge servers are deployed at base stations to offer highly accessible computing and storage resources to nearby app users. From the app vendor's perspective, caching data on edge servers can ensure low latency in app users' retrieval of app data. However, an edge server normally owns limited resources due to its limited size. In this paper, we investigate the collaborative caching problem in the EC environment with the aim to minimize the system cost including data caching cost, data migration cost, and quality-of-service (QoS) penalty. We model this collaborative edge data caching problem (CEDC) as a constrained optimization problem and prove that it is NP-complete. We propose an online algorithm, called CEDC-O, to solve this CEDC problem during all time slots. CEDC-O is developed based on Lyapunov optimization, works online without requiring future information, and achieves provable close-to-optimal performance. CEDC-O is evaluated on a real-world data set, and the results demonstrate that it significantly outperforms two representative approaches.

Edge computing, as an extension of cloud computing, distributes computing and storage resources from centralized cloud to distributed edge servers, to power a variety of applications demanding low latency, e.g., IoT services, virtual reality, real-time navigation, etc. From an app vendor's perspective, app data needs to be transferred from the cloud to specific edge servers in an area to serve the app users in the area. However, according to the pay-as-you-go business model, distributing a large amount of data from the cloud to edge servers can be expensive. The optimal data distribution strategy must minimize the cost incurred, which includes two major components, the cost of data transmission between the cloud to edge servers and the cost of data transmission between edge servers. In the meantime, the delay constraint must be fulfilled - the data distribution must not take too long. In this paper, we make the first attempt to formulate this Edge Data Distribution (EDD) problem from the app vendor's perspective and prove its NP-hardness. We propose an optimal approach named EDD-IP and an O(k)-approximation algorithm named EDD-A. EDD-IP and EDD-A are evaluated on a real-world dataset and the results demonstrate that they significantly outperform three representative approaches.

With the widespread application of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a flood of similarly functioning services have been deployed online. How to recommend services to users to meet their individual needs becomes the key issue in service recommendation. In recent years, methods based on collaborative filtering (CF) have been widely proposed for service recommendation. However, traditional CF typically exploits only low-dimensional and linear interactions between users and services and is challenged by the problem of data sparsity in the real world. To address these issues, inspired by deep learning, this article proposes a new deep CF model for service recommendation, named location-aware deep CF (LDCF). This model offers the following innovations: 1) the location features are mapped into high-dimensional dense embedding vectors; 2) the multilayer-perceptron (MLP) captures the high-dimensional and nonlinear characteristics; and 3) the similarity adaptive corrector (AC) is first embedded in the output layer to correct the predictive quality of service. Equipped with these, LDCF can not only learn the high-dimensional and nonlinear interactions between users and services but also significantly alleviate the data sparsity problem. Through substantial experiments conducted on a real-world Web service dataset, results indicate that LDCF's recommendation performance obviously outperforms nine state-of-the-art service recommendation methods.

Edge computing allows app vendor to deploy its applications and relevant data on distributed edge servers to serve its users in close proximity. Caching data on edge servers can minimize users' data retrieval latency. However, such data are subject to both intentional and accidental corruption in the highly distributed and dynamic edge computing environment. Given a large number of edge servers and their limited computing resources, how to effectively and efficiently audit the integrity of app vendors' cache data is a critical and challenging problem. This paper makes the first attempt to tackle this Edge Data Integrity (EDI) problem. We first analyze the threat model and the audit objectives, then propose a lightweight sampling-based probabilistic approach, namely EDI-V, to help app vendors audit the integrity of their data cached on a large scale of edge servers. We propose a new data structure named variable Merkle hash tree (VMHT) for generating the integrity proofs of data replicas during the audit. VMHT can ensure audit accuracy by maintaining sampling uniformity. EDI-V allows app vendors to inspect their cache data and locate the corrupted ones efficiently and effectively. Both theoretical analysis and comprehensively experimental evaluation demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of EDI-V.