ParaDrop

Abstract

The landscape of computing capabilities within the home has seen a recent shift from persistent desktops to mobile platforms, which has led to the use of the cloud as the primary computing platform implemented by developers today. However, a growing number of high quality services restrict computational tasks to be colocated with the enduser. Thus, we introduce a specific edge computing framework, called ParaDrop, which allows developers to leverage one of the last bastions of persistent computing resources in the end customer premises: the gateway (e.g., the WiFi Access Point or home set-top box). Using our platform, which has been fully implemented on real hardware, developers can design virtually isolated compute containers to provide an persistent computational presence in the proximity of the end-user. The compute containers, retain user state, and also move with the users as the latter changes their points of attachment. We demonstrate the capabilities of our platform by implementing two third-party applications, which utilize the framework we have provided. The framework we have implemented for the developer allows multitenancy through virtualization, dynamic installation through our developer API, and tight resource control through a managed policy design.

Do we all really know what a fog node is? Current trends towards an open definition

“…By reviewing the existing literature, Bonomi et al in [31] suggested edge devices to be configured as either virtualized (in VMs) or offered as bare metal. However, other contributions, see [47], [48] and [49], use the containers to run applications in fog nodes -considered in these works as mini-clouds at the edge of the network -, due to their reduced memory capacity, computing footprint, and small size. Aligned to the latter concepts, if the mini-cloud component in the fog node is virtualized by means of containers, shall we assume that edge devices should be virtualized in the same fashion?…”