Papers for

edge computing operators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Algorithm learns best way to balance jobs between different servers

Learning Adaptive SED for heterogeneous load balancing

Abstract: We study a two-server load balancing system with heterogeneous service rates that are a priori unknown to the dispatcher. The goal is to route customers according to the Shortest--Expected--Delay (SED) policy, but this requires knowledge of the service rates. Empirical policies that route based on estimates perform poorly: due to estimation error, the empirical policy disagrees with the oracle on an infinite region of the state space. We propose an online learning algorithm that converges to SED while learning the service rates. The algorithm carefully balances empirical SED routing with forced exploration phases that guarantee sufficient sampling of both servers. We prove that our algorithm achieves finite regret; this differs from classical Multi-Armed Bandit settings where regret typically grows logarithmically in time. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of our algorithm and highlight the regimes in which forced exploration is especially beneficial.

Mon 7 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Sometimes computers need to decide how to send jobs to different servers that work at different speeds but the speeds are unknown at first. Simply guessing the speeds and choosing the fastest server can lead to bad decisions because the guesses are often wrong. The authors introduce a smart method that learns the true speeds over time by sometimes trying both servers on purpose to get better information. This strategy helps the system quickly figure out the best way to send jobs with less delay. Tests show this method outperforms simple guess-based policies, especially when careful exploration is crucial.
Open 2609.06881v1