Edge-as-a-Service: Towards Distributed Cloud Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces an Edge-as-a-Service platform that enables distributed cloud architectures by integrating edge nodes, improving QoS, reducing cloud data traffic, and minimizing application latency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel EaaS platform with a lightweight discovery protocol and scalable resource provisioning for distributed cloud-edge integration.

Findings

Low overheads of less than 6%

Reduced data traffic to the cloud by up to 95%

Minimized application latency between 40%-60%

Abstract

We present an Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform for realising distributed cloud architectures and integrating the edge of the network in the computing ecosystem. The EaaS platform is underpinned by (i) a lightweight discovery protocol that identifies edge nodes and make them publicly accessible in a computing environment, and (ii) a scalable resource provisioning mechanism for offloading workloads from the cloud on to the edge for servicing multiple user requests. We validate the feasibility of EaaS on an online game use-case to highlight the improvement in the QoS of the application hosted on our cloud-edge platform. On this platform we demonstrate (i) low overheads of less than 6%, (ii) reduced data traffic to the cloud by up to 95% and (iii) minimised application latency between 40%-60%.