An experimental study of the response time in an edge-cloud continuum with ClusterLink

TL;DR

This study evaluates how inter-cluster communication via ClusterLink affects application response times in an edge-cloud setup, highlighting minimal overhead for small payloads and increased delay with larger data or older hardware.

Contribution

It provides an experimental analysis of ClusterLink's response time implications across different network topologies and hardware conditions in an edge-cloud environment.

Findings

ClusterLink adds minimal overhead for small payloads on modern hardware.

Larger payloads and older hardware increase communication delays with ClusterLink.

Response times vary with network topology and hardware age.

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct an experimental study to provide a general sense of the application response time implications that inter-cluster communication experiences at the edge at the example of a specific IoT-edge-cloud contiuum solution from the EU Project ICOS called ClusterLink. We create an environment to emulate different networking topologies that include multiple cloud or edge sites scenarios, and conduct a set of tests to compare the application response times via ClusterLink to direct communications in relation to node distances and request/response payload size. Our results show that, in an edge context, ClusterLink does not introduce a significant processing overhead to the communication for small payloads as compared to cloud. For higher payloads and on comparably more aged consumer hardware, ClusterLink version 0.2 introduces communication overhead relative to the delay experienced on the link.