Staleness Control for Edge Data Analytics

A new generation of cyber-physical systems has emerged with a large number of devices that continuously generate and consume massive amounts of data in a distributed and mobile manner. Accurate and near real-time decisions based on such streaming data are in high demand in many areas of optimization for such systems. Edge data analytics bring processing power in the proximity of data sources, reduce the network delay for data transmission, allow large-scale distributed training, and consequently help meeting real-time requirements. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of data sources leads to multiple distributed machine learning models that may suffer from sub-optimal performance due to the inconsistency in their states. In this work, we tackle the insularity, concept drift, and connectivity issues in edge data analytics to minimize its accuracy handicap without losing its timeliness benefits. To this end, we propose an efficient model synchronization mechanism for distributed and stateful data analytics. Staleness Control for Edge Data Analytics (SCEDA) ensures the high adaptability of synchronization frequency in the face of an unpredictable environment by addressing the trade-off between the generality and timeliness of the model. Making use of online reinforcement learning, SCEDA has low computational overhead, automatically adapts to changes, and does not require additional data monitoring.