HRS: Hybrid Representation Framework with Scheduling Awareness for Time Series Forecasting in Crowdsourced Cloud-Edge Platforms

TL;DR

HRS is a novel hybrid framework for time series load forecasting in crowdsourced cloud-edge platforms that combines numerical and image-based data representations with a scheduling-aware loss to improve QoS and profitability.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid representation framework with scheduling awareness and a new loss function to better predict extreme loads and support scheduling decisions.

Findings

Reduces SLA violation rates by 63.1%.

Decreases total profit loss by 32.3%.

Outperforms ten baseline methods on four real-world datasets.

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of streaming services, network load exhibits highly time-varying and bursty behavior, posing serious challenges for maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) in Crowdsourced Cloud-Edge Platforms (CCPs). While CCPs leverage Predict-then-Schedule architecture to improve QoS and profitability, accurate load forecasting remains challenging under traffic surges. Existing methods either minimize mean absolute error, resulting in underprovisioning and potential Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations during peak periods, or adopt conservative overprovisioning strategies, which mitigate SLA risks at the expense of increased resource expenditure. To address this dilemma, we propose HRS, a hybrid representation framework with scheduling awareness that integrates numerical and image-based representations to better capture extreme load dynamics. We further introduce a Scheduling-Aware Loss (SAL) that captures the asymmetric impact of prediction errors, guiding predictions that better support scheduling decisions. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that HRS consistently outperforms ten baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing SLA violation rates by 63.1% and total profit loss by 32.3%.