Towards Grassroots Peering at the Edge

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential for grassroots peering at the edge in fog computing, proposing direct edge-to-edge links among operators to improve latency and privacy, and highlighting open research challenges.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of grassroots peering at the edge and explores implementation options and research challenges for direct edge-to-edge connectivity.

Findings

Grassroots peering can improve latency and privacy in fog computing.

Direct edge-to-edge links are a feasible solution for multi-ISP environments.

Open research challenges include deployment, security, and standardization.

Abstract

Fog Computing allows applications to address their latency and privacy requirements while coping with bandwidth limitations of Internet service providers (ISPs). Existing research on fog systems has so far mostly taken a very high-level view on the actual fog infrastructure. In this position paper, we identify and discuss the problem of having multiple ISPs in edge-to-edge communication. As a possible solution we propose that edge operators create direct edge-to-edge links in a grassroots fashion and discuss different implementation options. Based on this, we highlight some important open research challenges that result from this.