Mobile Elastic Edge Clouds for Scalable, Low-Latency Services

Timothy Wood, George Washington University, PI
K.K. Ramakrishnan, University of California Riverside, PI
Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, PI

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation’s CNS-CSR Grants #1763548, #1763929, and #1763834.

Smart wearables, the Internet of Things, and new application types such as augmented reality promise to revolutionize how people interact with technology in their daily lives. While embedded and smart devices have growing capabilities, they still rely on a backend cloud infrastructure to provide additional storage and computational capacity. However, these new application types have characteristics such as strict performance requirements and frequent mobility that are ill suited for today’s centralized clouds. This project will develop new system architectures that will increase the scalability, elasticity, and mobility of “edge” applications that connect to mobile users.

Towards this end, the project will explore the communication and system architectures needed to effectively support edge cloud services. The project will leverage advances in network function virtualization to provide high performance networking, and will explore the communication and Operating System primitives needed to support scalable middleboxes and application endpoints. Using this platform as a base, the project will design models that capture the new challenges inherent in mobile edge cloud workloads. These models will be used to guide elastic scaling algorithms.

We are increasingly reliant on mobile computing devices to guide our cars, help us keep in touch with others, gather data of our surroundings, and more. The mobile elastic edge cloud platform being developed in this project will help improve the scalability, agility, and efficiency of edge clouds, allowing them to support new types of performance critical applications. The PIs will engage a broad range of students from the undergraduate to Ph.D. levels in the educational and research activities of this grant.

Publications