A Decentralized and Self-Adaptive Approach for Monitoring Volatile Edge Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces DEMon, a decentralized, self-adaptive monitoring system for volatile edge environments that improves data dissemination, reduces latency, and enhances reliability compared to traditional centralized systems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel decentralized, self-adaptive architecture using stochastic gossip protocols for edge monitoring, addressing failure and latency issues of traditional systems.

Findings

Efficient information dissemination and retrieval demonstrated.

Reduces latency and failure points in edge monitoring.

Self-adaptive control optimizes resource use and monitoring quality.

Abstract

Edge computing provides resources for IoT workloads at the network edge. Monitoring systems are vital for efficiently managing resources and application workloads by collecting, storing, and providing relevant information about the state of the resources. However, traditional monitoring systems have a centralized architecture for both data plane and control plane, which increases latency, creates a failure bottleneck, and faces challenges in providing quick and trustworthy data in volatile edge environments, especially where infrastructures are often built upon failure-prone, unsophisticated computing and network resources. Thus, we propose DEMon, a decentralized, self-adaptive monitoring system for edge. DEMon leverages the stochastic gossip communication protocol at its core. It develops efficient protocols for information dissemination, communication, and retrieval, avoiding a single point of failure and ensuring fast and trustworthy data access. Its decentralized control enables self-adaptive management of monitoring parameters, addressing the trade-offs between the quality of service of monitoring and resource consumption. We implement the proposed system as a lightweight and portable container-based system and evaluate it through experiments. We also present a use case demonstrating its feasibility. The results show that DEMon efficiently disseminates and retrieves the monitoring information, addressing the challenges of edge monitoring.