2026· IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking· Vol 12, pp. 11341-11357· 0 citations· 39 references
Abstract
Cloud-edge-end collaborative Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing requires schedulers that allocate heterogeneous resources for Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-structured workflows across network tiers. Cross-tier data transfers create ripple effects where a single placement decision propagates delays to downstream tasks, degrading end-to-end completion rates. This paper presents DREAM, a Dynamic Ripple-Effect-Aware Meta-scheduling scheme in which Critical Path Lookahead Scheduling (CPLS) performs bounded-depth trajectory planning with soft reservations for critical tasks, while Opportunity-Cost-Aware Placement (OCAP) evaluates non-critical tasks through a four-component cost covering immediate efficiency, ripple effect, load stability, and opportunity cost. Extensive simulations demonstrate that under the heavy load of 600 tasks, DREAM sustains a task completion rate of ~66%, exceeding classical heuristics by over 10 percentage points. At the extreme load of 1000 tasks, the system utility score improves by 47% over HEFT. Robustness experiments verify competitive performance across multiple DAG topologies and estimation-noise levels.
G-STAR is a general graph-based scheduling framework that formalizes complex MAS pipelines as attributed Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and develops an industry-grade orchestration stack with asynchronous execution, resilient serving, and audit-friendly artifacts, offering a practical solution for optimizing web-scale deployments of complex MAS pipelines.
Jiabao Song, Yunsheng Xia, Beibei Kong et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
The lack of determinism restricts the integration of safety-critical applications into Edge–Fog–Cloud (EFC) architectures. Existing EFC schedulers are typically designed for dynamic, best-effort operation based on unmanaged resource allocation and elastic virtualization. This paradigm introduces unbounded queueing, resource contention, and timing jitter, making standard schedulers unsuitable for hard-deadline workloads. Moreover, most approaches focus on computational placement, while communication is abstracted or treated as a secondary cost term. As a result, bounded-latency routing and deterministic task execution are rarely co-optimized under a unified timing model. This paper addresses these gaps by utilizing a managed Time-Triggered Edge–Fog–Cloud (TTEFC) architecture that supports safety-critical workloads, orchestrates IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) for local intra-domain communication, and uses IETF Deterministic Networking (DetNet) for routed inter-domain paths. On this infrastructure, a hierarchical genetic algorithm (HGA) is proposed to jointly schedule partition-to-execution-location allocation, partition execution order, inter-partition route selection, and negotiated per-partition time budgets that act as temporal boundaries for parallel partition-level optimizers. An adaptive slack reallocation operator redistributes unused temporal slack from over-satisfied partitions to budget-violating partitions, improving feasibility convergence. Experiments on synthetic DAG workloads with 100–500 tasks compare the proposed HGA against HEFT and round-robin baselines. These baselines are included as scoped external references to contextualize the end-to-end scheduling performance of the proposed method. Ablation results show that slack reallocation improves partition-budget feasibility, reaches feasible budget assignments earlier, and produces tighter budget–makespan alignment than feedback-free and static-budget variants. An automotive-characteristic DAG case study further evaluates the method on an application-oriented workload under the same timing and communication assumptions.
Omar Hekal, Josepaul Paulachan, Daniel Onwuchekwa et al.· Future Internet· 0 citations
Results provide initial evidence that multi-round CNP refinement is the principal protocol-level gain, with LLM assistance adding value for qualitative and uncertain runtime context.
Autonomous vehicles offload latency-sensitive perception tasks to nearby mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, where a missed safety-critical task is unsafe rather than merely degraded. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as adaptive, explainable schedulers, yet evidence of when they help is scarce. We study deadline-aware, mixed-criticality scheduling on heterogeneous MEC servers, where time-critical (TC) tasks must be protected at a controlled cost to best-effort traffic, and ask whether a multi-agent LLM control layer improves on a strong heuristic. We answer in two steps. First we build the heuristic: a windowed contract-net auction that orders each admission window time-critical-first by earliest deadline and places tasks by earliest-finish-time. Across 60 instances on three topologies and 15 baselines under an identical online constraint, it attains a TC completion rate of 0.902, above every baseline (Holm-corrected p<0.001; best baseline 0.838) and at 0.87 of a CP-SAT upper bound. Second, we add the LLM control plane. A controlled decomposition traces the scheduler's advantage to two ordinary factors, the batching horizon and time-critical-first ordering; the auction, the per-window LLM policy, and online adaptation add nothing while the load is stationary, where the heuristic is already near-optimal. Under a mid-run surge of safety-critical tasks the picture changes, and the LLM control plane gains significantly over both the static heuristic and the bandit. LLM orchestration therefore earns its cost only when non-stationarity opens headroom a fixed policy cannot use. We report control-plane latency and rationale, and release all code and seeded instances.
High-velocity workloads and intricate task dependencies inherent in distributed stream-processing systems pose a fundamental challenge to efficient resource allocation. Traditional heuristic and single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) schedulers frequently fail to recognize these complex network and data-flow interactions, leading to severe resource fragmentation and catastrophic tail latency spikes. In order to accomplish coordinated, low-latency scheduling, we propose a Topology-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (TAMARL) framework utilizing a Centralized Training and Decentralized Execution (CTDE) architecture. TAMARL allows distributed agents to optimize task placement across heterogeneous cluster nodes and prevent backpressure cascades by integrating topology-aware state representations. We evaluate TAMARL on a production-grade cloud-native stack leveraging Apache Flink and Kubernetes. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines across six demanding stress-test scenarios, experimental evaluations demonstrate that TAMARL improves Service Level Objective (SLO) attainment by 27% while reducing P99 tail latency by up to 68%. Additionally, TAMARL maintains stable, resilient performance under 90% cluster utilization while securing 95% network locality.
Sunday J. Awine, Jinwei Liu· IEEE International Conferenc...· 0 citations