VM handoff enables rapid and transparent placement changes to executing code in edge computing use cases where the safety and management attributes of VM encapsulation are important. This versatile primitive offers the functionality of classic live migration but is highly optimized for the edge. Over WAN bandwidths ranging from 5 to 25 Mbps, VM handoff migrates a running 8 GB VM in about a minute, with a downtime of a few tens of seconds. By dynamically adapting to varying network bandwidth and processing load, VM handoff is more than an order of magnitude faster than live migration at those bandwidths. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

This paper investigates the use of drones for live inspection in the construction industry. The key technical challenge is the real-time registration of the drone video feed to the architectural plan. We present and evaluate three different approaches for registration and propose an edge-based prototype using visual features. Our evaluations show that GPS alone is not sufficient for accurate registration, but with visual features, accuracies within ten centimeters can be achieved.

The growth of edge computing depends on large-scale deployments of edge infrastructure. Benchmarking applications are needed to compare the performance across different edge deployments and against device-only and cloud-only implementations. In this article, we present OpenRTiST, an open-source application that is simultaneously compute-intensive, bandwidth-hungry, and latency-sensitive. It implements a form of augmented reality that lets you "see the world through the eyes of an artist." We compare end-to-end application latency over varying network conditions and measure performance across a variety of edge platforms. OpenRTiST is designed to be easily deployed and has been used to showcase the benefits of edge computing.

Edge computing was motivated by the vision of new edge-native applications that are compute-intensive, bandwidth-hungry, and latency-sensitive. We show how infrastructure deployed for such futuristic applications can also benefit virtual machine (VM)-encapsulated Windows or Linux closed-source legacy applications. We present a new capability for legacy applications called edge-based virtual desktop infrastructure (EdgeVDI), and discuss example use cases that it enables. 2020

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