Multi-step Prediction of Worker Resource Usage at the Extreme Edge

Democratizing the edge by leveraging the prolific yet underutilized computational resources of end devices, referred to as Extreme Edge Devices (EEDs), can open a new edge computing tech market that is people-owned, democratically managed, and accessible/lucrative to all. Parallel computing at EEDs can also move the computing service much closer to end-users, which can help satisfy the stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of delay-critical and/or data-intensive IoT applications. However, EEDs are heterogeneous user-owned devices, and are thus subject to a highly dynamic user access behavior (i.e., dynamic resource usage). This makes the process of determining the computational capability of EEDs increasingly challenging. Estimating the dynamic resource usage of EEDs (i.e., workers) has been mostly overlooked. The complexity of Machine Learning (ML)-based models renders them impractical for deployment at the edge for the purpose of such estimations. In this paper, we propose the Resource Usage Multi-step Prediction (RUMP) scheme to estimate the dynamic resource usage of workers over multiple steps ahead in a computationally efficient way while providing a relatively high prediction accuracy. Towards that end, RUMP exploits the use of the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process-Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HDP-HSMM) to estimate the dynamic resource usage of workers in EED-based computing paradigms. Extensive evaluations on a real testbed of heterogeneous workers for multi-step sizes show an 87.5% prediction accuracy for the starting point of 2-steps and coming to as little as a 16% average difference in prediction error compared to a representative of state-of-the-art ML-based schemes.