Federated Machine Learning for Resource Allocation in Multi-domain Fog Ecosystems

Abstract: The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increasingly demanded intimacy between cloud services and end-users. This has incentivised extending cloud resources to the edge in what is deemed fog computing. The latter is manifesting as an ecosystem of connected clouds, geo-dispersed and of diverse capacities. In such conditions, workload allocation to fog services becomes a non-trivial challenge due to the complexity of trade-offs. Users' demand at the edge is highly diverse, which does not lend itself to straightforward resource planning. Conversely, running services at the edge may leverage proximity, but it comes at higher operational cost let alone rapidly increasing the risk of straining sparse resources. Consequently, there is a need for intelligent yet scalable allocation solutions that counter the adversity of demand at the edge, while efficiently distributing load between the edge and farther clouds. Machine learning is increasingly adopted in resource planning. However, besides privacy concerns, central learning is highly demanding, both computationally and in data supply. Instead, this paper proposes a federated deep reinforcement learning system, based on deep Q-learning network (DQN), for workload distribution in a fog ecosystem. The proposed solution adapts a DQN to optimize local workload allocations, made by single gateways. Federated learning is incorporated to allow multiple gateways in a network to collaboratively build knowledge of users' demand. This is leveraged to establish consensus on the fraction of workload allocated to different fog nodes, using lower data supply and computation resources. The system performance is evaluated using realistic demand set from Google Cluster Workload Traces 2019. Evaluation results show over 50% reduction in failed allocations when distributing users over larger number of gateways, given fixed number of fog nodes. The results further illustrate the trade-offs between performance and cost under different conditions.