DECO: Joint Computation Scheduling, Caching, and Communication in Data-Intensive Computing Networks

Driven by technologies such as IoT-enabled health care, machine learning applications at the edge, and industrial automation, mobile edge and fog computing paradigms have reinforced a general trend toward decentralized computing, where any network node can route traffic, compute tasks, and store data, possibly at the same time. In many such computing environments, there is a need to cache significant amounts of data, which may include large data sets, machine learning models, or executable code. In this work, we propose a framework for joint computation scheduling, caching, and request forwarding within such decentralized computing environments. We first characterize the stability region of a ``genie-aided'' computing network where data required by computation are instantly accessible, and develop a throughput optimal control policy for this model. Based on this, we develop a practically implementable distributed and adaptive algorithm, and show that it exhibits superior performance in terms of average task completion time, when compared to several baseline policies.