Autonomic Federated-Market Orchestration for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

2026-05-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of scalable self-management and data sovereignty enforcement across autonomous domains in the edge–cloud continuum by proposing Neural Pub/Sub, a market-based federated agent architecture. It introduces Walrasian equilibrium theory into edge–cloud federated scheduling for the first time, leveraging decentralized price signals to orchestrate resources while achieving social welfare comparable to that of a centralized oracle under both tree-structured and series–parallel service dependency graphs. The system integrates MAPE-K adaptive control, marginal-cost clearing pricing, polyhedral feasibility-aware placement planning, and bounded-staleness price subscription mechanisms. Experimental results on a 48-node testbed demonstrate that the federated market improves task completion rates by 2–4% over a single-process oracle (p ≈ 2.8e⁻¹⁴), maintains completion rates above 98.7% under failures, and enforces data sovereignty policies with zero runtime overhead.

Abstract

The edge-cloud computing continuum demands self-management mechanisms that scale across autonomous administrative domains while honouring tenant- and operator-specified data sovereignty. We present Neural Pub/Sub, a federated-broker autonomic substrate whose self-organising behaviour emerges from market-based price signals rather than centralised control. Its MAPE-K control loop closes over per-broker health and load monitoring, marginal-cost clearing-price analysis, placement planning over a polymatroidal feasibility region, federated cross-domain dispatch, and shared peer subscription summaries with bounded-staleness price signals. The Plan step is anchored in a Walrasian convergence proposition: under gross-substitutes valuations on tree and series-parallel service-dependency DAGs, decentralised price-based allocation matches the welfare of a centralised oracle. We evaluate the substrate on a 4-VM, 4-domain, 48-worker federated edge-cloud testbed (single data centre, 50 ms emulated WAN) in a 1005-run campaign augmented by a fair-process-count sharded-oracle comparator. The federated market dominates a single-process oracle by 2-4% with 45 of 45 per-seed wins (sign-test p ~ 2.8e-14, Hodges-Lehmann median -39.6 ms); against a four-shard centralised orchestrator at equal process count the gap stays within +/-1.5% across all nine (pipeline, load) cells. Round-robin completion rate collapses 98.8% -> 22.4% -> 3.3% across arrival rates 5/10/15 pps while the market preserves completion; the advantage decomposes into three Walrasian properties (information completeness, admission control, price discovery). Federation withstands broker death and network partition (completion rate >= 98.7% across 75 cells), and sovereignty enforcement adds no measurable runtime overhead across 60 governance-grid runs. Heterogeneous-domain stressors and cross-site WAN deployment remain future work.

Problem

• edge-cloud continuum
• autonomic orchestration
• data sovereignty
• federated market
• self-management

Innovation

• Federated Market
• Autonomic Orchestration
• Walrasian Equilibrium
• Edge-Cloud Continuum
• Data Sovereignty