Adaptive Edge-Cloud Environments for Rural AI

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to computational resources while outsourcing infrastructure and service maintenance. Edge computing could extend cloud computing capability to areas with limited computing resources, such as rural areas, by utilizing low-cost hardware, such as single-board computers. Cloud data centre hosted machine learning algorithms may violate user privacy and data confidentiality requirements. Federated learning (FL) trains models without sending data to a central server and ensures data privacy. Using FL, multiple actors can collaborate on a single machine learning model without sharing data. However, rural network outages can happen at any time, and the quality of a wireless network varies depending on location, which can affect the performance of the Federated Learning application. Therefore there is a need to have a platform that maintains service quality independent of infrastructure status. We propose a self-adaptive system for rural FL, which employs the Greedy Nominator Heuristic (GNH) based optimisation to orchestrate application workflows across multiple resources that make up a rural computing environment. GNH provides distributed optimization for workflow placement. GNH utilises resource status to reduce failure risks and costs while still completing tasks on time. Our approach is validated using a simulated rural environment – composed of multiple decentralized controllers sharing the same infrastructure and running a shared FL application. Results show that GNH outperforms three algorithms for deployment of FL tasks: random placement, round-robin load balancer and simple greedy algorithm.