The rapid growth in technology and wide use of internet has increased smart applications such as intelligent transportation control system, and Internet of Things, which heavily rely on an efficient and reliable connectivity network. To overcome high bandwidth work load on the network, as well as minimize latency for real-time applications, the computation can be moved from the central cloud to a distributed edge cloud. The edge computing benefits various smart applications that uses distributed network for data analytics and services. Different from the existing cloud management solutions, edge computing needs to move cloud management services towards distributed heterogeneous edge nodes for multi-tenant user applications. However, existing cloud management services do not offer remote deployment of multi-tenant user applications on the cloud of edge nodes. In this paper, we propose a practical edge cloud software framework for deploying multi-tenant distributed smart applications. Having multiple distributed end nodes, auto discovery of all active end nodes is required for deploying multi-tenant user applications. However, existing cloud solutions require either private network or fixed IP address, which is not achievable for the distributed edge nodes. Most of the edge nodes connected through the public internet without fixed IP, and some of them even connect through IEEE 802.15 based sensor networks. We propose to build a software platform to manage the distributed edge nodes as well as support services to deploy and launch isolated, multi-tenant user applications through a lightweight container. We propose an architectural solution to remotely access edge cloud management services through intermittent internet connections. We open sourced our whole set of software solutions, and analyzed the major performance metrics of the edge cloud platform.
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EdgeNet: A Lightweight Scalable Edge Cloud
This paper describes EdgeNet, a lightweight cloud infrastructure for the edge. We aim to bring as much of the flexibility of open cloud computing as possible to a very lightweight, easily-deployed, software-only edge infrastructure. EdgeNet has been informed by the advances of cloud computing and the successes of such distributed systems as PlanetLab, GENI, G-Lab, SAVI, and V-Node: a large number of small points-of-presence, designed for the deployment of highly distributed experiments and applications. EdgeNet differs from its predecessors in two significant areas: first, it is a software-only infrastructure, where each worker node is designed to run part- or full-time on existing hardware at the local site; and, second, it uses modern, industry-standard software both as the node agent and the control framework. The first innovation permits rapid and unlimited scaling: whereas GENI and PlanetLab required the installation and maintenance of dedicated hardware at each site, EdgeNet requires only a software download, and a node can be added to the EdgeNet infrastructure in 15 minutes. The second offers performance, maintenance, and training benefits; rather than maintaining bespoke kernels and control frameworks, and developing training materials on using the latter, we are able to ride the wave of open-source and industry development, and the plethora of industry and community tutorial materials developed for industry standard control frameworks. The result is a global Kubernetes cluster, where pods of Docker containers form the service instances at each point of presence.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1820901
- PAR ID:
- 10097311
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Symposium on Edge Computing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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