CoRaiS: Lightweight Real-Time Scheduler for Multi-Edge Cooperative Computing

Multi-edge cooperative computing that combines constrained resources of multiple edges into a powerful resource pool has the potential to deliver great benefits, such as a tremendous computing power, improved response time, more diversified services. However, the mass heterogeneous resources composition and lack of scheduling strategies make the modeling and cooperating of multi-edge computing system particularly complicated. This paper first proposes a system-level state evaluation model to shield the complex hardware configurations and redefine the different service capabilities at heterogeneous edges. Secondly, an integer linear programming model is designed to cater for optimally dispatching the distributed arriving requests. Finally, a learning-based lightweight real-time scheduler, CoRaiS, is proposed. CoRaiS embeds the real-time states of multi-edge system and requests information, and combines the embeddings with a policy network to schedule the requests, so that the response time of all requests can be minimized. Evaluation results verify that CoRaiS can make a high-quality scheduling decision in real time, and can be generalized to other multi-edge computing system, regardless of system scales. Characteristic validation also demonstrates that CoRaiS successfully learns to balance loads, perceive real-time state and recognize heterogeneity while scheduling.