On edge microclouds to provide local container-based services

Abstract

Abstract-Edge computing has been proposed to enable more user-centric cloud-based services. Nowadays, edge computing is operational in industrial and consumer-oriented scenarios. An important limitation of today's solutions, however, is that the used hardware and software platforms are proprietary and closed, and cannot easily be leveraged to perform other services beyond the specific business case. For instance, the interaction among different edge platforms or service extension by third parties is in general not supported. As a consequence, the opportunity for local stakeholders to provide innovative tailored edge service with these platforms face important barriers. In this paper we present edge microclouds deployed on local servers and an implementation using containers for service provision. We show how the adopted container approach facilitates the users to create and share services at the network edge. With the presented approach, third parties can deploy more tailored and customized services at the network edge, enabling to better fulfill specific local needs and constraints. It is also an opportunity for building cloudbased service provision with a pool of local resource-constraint edge devices.

PiCasso: Enabling information-centric multi-tenancy at the edge of community mesh networks

“…The latest advances in lightweight virtualisation technologies (e.g., Docker, Unikernel), allows many developers to build local edge computing platform that could be used to deliver services within CMNs [3]. Despite delivering these lightweight services within a data centre is trivial, delivering them across intermittent connectivity of CMNs has a lot of challenges.…”