A QoS-Aware Machine Learning-Based Framework for AMI Applications in Smart Grids

EcoTaskSched: a hybrid machine learning approach for energy-efficient task scheduling in IoT-based fog-cloud environments

The widespread adoption of cloud services has posed several challenges, primarily revolving around energy and resource efficiency. Integrating cloud and fog resources can help address these challenges by improving fog-cloud computing environments. Nevertheless, the search for optimal task allocation and energy management in such environments continues. Existing studies have introduced notable solutions; however, it is still a challenging issue to efficiently utilize these heterogeneous cloud resources and achieve energy-efficient task scheduling in fog-cloud of things environment. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel ML-based EcoTaskSched model, which leverages deep learning for energy-efficient task scheduling in fog-cloud networks. The proposed hybrid model integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with Bidirectional Log-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) to enhance energy-efficient schedulability and reduce energy usage while ensuring QoS provisioning. The CNN model efficiently extracts workload features from tasks and resources, while the BiLSTM captures complex sequential information, predicting optimal task placement sequences. A real fog-cloud environment is implemented using the COSCO framework for the simulation setup together with four physical nodes from the Azure B2s plan to test the proposed model. The DeFog benchmark is used to develop task workloads, and data collection was conducted for both normal and intense workload scenarios. Before preprocessing the data was normalized, treated with feature engineering and augmentation, and then split into training and test sets. To evaluate performance, the proposed EcoTaskSched model demonstrated superiority by significantly reducing energy consumption and improving job completion rates compared to baseline models. Additionally, the EcoTaskSched model maintained a high job completion rate of 85%, outperforming GGCN and BiGGCN. It also achieved a lower average response time, and SLA violation rates, as well as increased throughput, and reduced execution cost compared to other baseline models. In its optimal configuration, the EcoTaskSched model is successfully applied to fog-cloud computing environments, increasing task handling efficiency and reducing energy consumption while maintaining the required QoS parameters. Our future studies will focus on long-term testing of the EcoTaskSched model in real-world IoT environments. We will also assess its applicability by integrating other ML models, which could provide enhanced insights for optimizing scheduling algorithms across diverse fog-cloud settings.

Context-Aware Edge-Based AI Models for Wireless Sensor Networks-An Overview

Recent advances in sensor technology are expected to lead to a greater use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in industry, logistics, healthcare, etc. On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) are becoming dominant solutions for processing large amounts of data from edge-synthesized heterogeneous sensors and drawing accurate conclusions with better understanding of the situation. Integration of the two areas WSN and AI has resulted in more accurate measurements, context-aware analysis and prediction useful for smart sensing applications. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in context-aware intelligent systems using sensor technology is provided. In addition, it also discusses the areas in which they are used, related challenges, motivations for adopting AI solutions, focusing on edge computing, i.e., sensor and AI techniques, along with analysis of existing research gaps. Another contribution of this study is the use of a semantic-aware approach to extract survey-relevant subjects. The latter specifically identifies eleven main research topics supported by the articles included in the work. These are analyzed from various angles to answer five main research questions. Finally, potential future research directions are also discussed.

QoS-Aware Cost Minimization Strategy for AMI Applications in Smart Grid Using Cloud Computing

Cloud computing coupled with Internet of Things technology provides a wide range of cloud services such as memory, storage, computational processing, network bandwidth, and database application to the end users on demand over the Internet. More specifically, cloud computing provides efficient services such as “pay as per usage”. However, Utility providers in Smart Grid are facing challenges in the design and implementation of such architecture in order to minimize the cost of underlying hardware, software, and network services. In Smart Grid, smart meters generate a large volume of different traffics, due to which efficient utilization of available resources such as buffer, storage, limited processing, and bandwidth is required in a cost-effective manner in the underlying network infrastructure. In such context, this article introduces a QoS-aware Hybrid Queue Scheduling (HQS) model that can be seen over the IoT-based network integrated with cloud environment for different advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) application traffic, which have different QoS levels in the Smart Grid network. The proposed optimization model supports, classifies, and prioritizes the AMI application traffic. The main objective is to reduce the cost of buffer, processing power, and network bandwidth utilized by AMI applications in the cloud environment. For this, we developed a simulation model in the CloudSim simulator that uses a simple mathematical model in order to achieve the objective function. During the simulations, the effects of various numbers of cloudlets on the cost of virtual machine resources such as RAM, CPU processing, and available bandwidth have been investigated in cloud computing. The obtained simulation results exhibited that our proposed model successfully competes with the previous schemes in terms of minimizing the processing, memory, and bandwidth cost by a significant margin. Moreover, the simulation results confirmed that the proposed optimization model behaves as expected and is realistic for AMI application traffic in the Smart Grid network using cloud computing.