Peng Huang

Liekang Zeng, Xu Chen, Peng Huang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained growing interest in miscellaneous applications owing to their outstanding ability in extracting latent representation on graph structures. To render GNN-based service for IoT-driven smart applications, traditional model serving paradigms usually resort to the cloud by fully uploading geo-distributed input data to remote datacenters. However, our empirical measurements reveal the significant communication overhead of such cloud-based serving and highlight the profound potential in applying the emerging fog computing. To maximize the architectural benefits brought by fog computing, in this paper, we present Fograph, a novel distributed real-time GNN inference framework that leverages diverse and dynamic resources of multiple fog nodes in proximity to IoT data sources. By introducing heterogeneity-aware execution planning and GNN-specific compression techniques, Fograph tailors its design to well accommodate the unique characteristics of GNN serving in fog environments. Prototype-based evaluation and case study demonstrate that Fograph significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art cloud serving and fog deployment by up to 5.39x execution speedup and 6.84x throughput improvement.

Peng Huang, Liekang Zeng, Xu Chen et al.

With the wide penetration of smart robots in multifarious fields, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique in robotics has attracted growing attention in the community. Yet collaborating SLAM over multiple robots still remains challenging due to performance contradiction between the intensive graphics computation of SLAM and the limited computing capability of robots. While traditional solutions resort to the powerful cloud servers acting as an external computation provider, we show by real-world measurements that the significant communication overhead in data offloading prevents its practicability to real deployment. To tackle these challenges, this paper promotes the emerging edge computing paradigm into multi-robot SLAM and proposes RecSLAM, a multi-robot laser SLAM system that focuses on accelerating map construction process under the robot-edge-cloud architecture. In contrast to conventional multi-robot SLAM that generates graphic maps on robots and completely merges them on the cloud, RecSLAM develops a hierarchical map fusion technique that directs robots' raw data to edge servers for real-time fusion and then sends to the cloud for global merging. To optimize the overall pipeline, an efficient multi-robot SLAM collaborative processing framework is introduced to adaptively optimize robot-to-edge offloading tailored to heterogeneous edge resource conditions, meanwhile ensuring the workload balancing among the edge servers. Extensive evaluations show RecSLAM can achieve up to 39% processing latency reduction over the state-of-the-art. Besides, a proof-of-concept prototype is developed and deployed in real scenes to demonstrate its effectiveness.