A Commodity SBC-Edge Cluster for Smart Cities

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective, low-energy SBC-based edge cluster framework for smart city applications, demonstrated through a smart parking use-case, leveraging containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SBC-EC framework using containerization and Kubernetes for smart city edge computing, validated with a smart parking application.

Findings

SBCs can effectively serve as edge devices in smart city applications.

The container-based SBC-EC framework reduces costs and energy consumption.

The proof-of-concept demonstrates feasibility and efficiency for IoT use-cases.

Abstract

The commodity Single Board Computers (SBCs) are increasingly becoming powerful and can execute standard operating systems and mainstream workloads. In the context of cloud-based smart city applications, SBCs can be utilized as Edge computing devices reducing the network communication. In this paper, we investigate the design and implementation of a SBC based edge cluster (SBC-EC) framework for a smart parking application. Since SBCs are resource constrained devices, we devise a container-based framework for a lighter foot-print. Kubernetes was used as an orchestration tool to orchestrate various containers in the framework. To validate our approach, we implemented a proof-of-concept of the SBC based Edge cluster for a smart parking application, as a possible IoT use-case. Our implementation shows that, the use of SBC devices at the edge of a cloud based smart parking application is a cost effective and low energy, green computing solution. The proposed framework can be extended to similar cloud-based applications in the context of a smart city.