Realizing Edge Marketplaces: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper explores the development of edge marketplaces that facilitate service provision at network edges, addressing challenges like resource intermittency and proposing blockchain-based solutions for regulation and operation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of an edge marketplace supporting multiple providers, discusses resilience and regulation, and presents practical application scenarios.

Findings

Edge marketplaces can support diverse user applications.

Blockchain technology offers promising regulation and operation mechanisms.

Practical scenarios demonstrate marketplace functionality.

Abstract

The edge of the network has the potential to host services for supporting a variety of user applications, ranging in complexity from data preprocessing, image and video rendering, and interactive gaming, to embedded systems in autonomous cars and built environments. However, the computational and data resources over which such services are hosted, and the actors that interact with these services, have an intermittent availability and access profile, introducing significant risk for user applications that must rely on them. This article investigates the development of an edge marketplace, which is able to support multiple providers for offering services at the network edge, and to enable demand supply for influencing the operation of such a marketplace. Resilience, cost, and quality of service and experience will subsequently enable such a marketplace to adapt its services over time. This article also describes how distributed-ledger technologies (such as blockchains) provide a promising approach to support the operation of such a marketplace and regulate its behavior (such as the GDPR in Europe) and operation. Two application scenarios provide context for the discussion of how such a marketplace would function and be utilized in practice.