Edge-facilitated wireless distributed computing

Songze Li, Qian Yu, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, A. Salman Avestimehr

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a framework for edge-facilitated wireless distributed computing, in which several mobile users connected to an access point collaborate for a distributed computing task. We characterize the minimum communication load, both in uplink (from users to the access point) and downlink (from access point to the users), required for distributed computing. In particular, we develop a communication scheme and a dataset placement strategy that induces a particular overlap of computations at the users, which can then be exploited for coding at both users and the access point to significantly reduce the communication load. We demonstrate that the reduction in communication load (compared to uncoded solutions) can scale linearly with the size of the network (i.e., the number of users), hence our proposed scheme can result in a "scalable" design for edge- facilitated wireless distributed computing (i.e., accommodating any number of users without incurring extra communication load). Furthermore, we establish the optimality of the proposed scheme by developing a tight information theoretic outer- bound, and demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the minimum uplink and downlink communication load simultaneously. We also generalize the results to a decentralized setting, in which a random and a priori unknown subset of users may participate in distributed computing at each time, and characterize the minimum communication load for uniformly random dataset placement at users.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2016 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781509013289
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event59th IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2016 - Washington, United States
Duration: Dec 4 2016Dec 8 2016

Publication series

Name2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2016 - Proceedings

Other

Other59th IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period12/4/1612/8/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

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