DeepFT: Fault-Tolerant Edge Computing using a Self-Supervised Deep Surrogate Model

TL;DR

DeepFT is a scalable, self-supervised deep surrogate model designed for fault prediction and diagnosis in resource-constrained edge computing, significantly improving fault detection accuracy and QoS metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-supervised learning approach with a deep surrogate model for proactive fault tolerance in edge computing environments.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods in fault detection accuracy.

Reduces service deadline violations by up to 37%.

Improves response time by up to 9%.

Abstract

The emergence of latency-critical AI applications has been supported by the evolution of the edge computing paradigm. However, edge solutions are typically resource-constrained, posing reliability challenges due to heightened contention for compute and communication capacities and faulty application behavior in the presence of overload conditions. Although a large amount of generated log data can be mined for fault prediction, labeling this data for training is a manual process and thus a limiting factor for automation. Due to this, many companies resort to unsupervised fault-tolerance models. Yet, failure models of this kind can incur a loss of accuracy when they need to adapt to non-stationary workloads and diverse host characteristics. To cope with this, we propose a novel modeling approach, called DeepFT, to proactively avoid system overloads and their adverse effects by optimizing the task scheduling and migration decisions. DeepFT uses a deep surrogate model to accurately predict and diagnose faults in the system and co-simulation based self-supervised learning to dynamically adapt the model in volatile settings. It offers a highly scalable solution as the model size scales by only 3 and 1 percent per unit increase in the number of active tasks and hosts. Extensive experimentation on a Raspberry-Pi based edge cluster with DeFog benchmarks shows that DeepFT can outperform state-of-the-art baseline methods in fault-detection and QoS metrics. Specifically, DeepFT gives the highest F1 scores for fault-detection, reducing service deadline violations by up to 37\% while also improving response time by up to 9%.