Smart wearables, the Internet of Things, and new application types, such as augmented reality promise to revolutionize how people interact with technology in their daily lives. While embedded and smart devices have growing capabilities, they still rely on a backend cloud infrastructure to provide additional storage and computational capacity. However, these new application types have characteristics such as strict performance requirements and frequent mobility that are ill suited for today's centralized clouds. This project will develop new system architectures that will increase the scalability, elasticity, and mobility of "edge" applications that connect to mobile users.
Towards this end, the project will explore the communication and system architectures needed to effectively support edge cloud services. The project will leverage advances in network function virtualization to provide high performance networking, and will explore the communication and Operating System primitives needed to support scalable middleboxes and application endpoints. Using this platform as a base, the project will design models that capture the new challenges inherent in mobile edge cloud workloads. These models will be used to guide elastic scaling algorithms.
We are increasingly reliant on mobile computing devices to guide our cars, help us keep in touch with others, gather data of our surroundings, and more. The mobile elastic edge cloud platform being developed in this project will help improve the scalability, agility, and efficiency of edge clouds, allowing them to support new types of performance critical applications. The researchers will engage a broad range of students from the undergraduate to Ph.D. levels in the educational and research activities of this grant.
There will be a project website (http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/timwood/projects/me2c) that includes all of the artifacts produced throughout the project as well as links to key related technologies and papers. The web repository will include all of the source code developed during the course of the project, documentation with guidance to adopters on using the software, and links to all the papers published and technical reports that are released publicly. The project web page will be maintained for a period of five years after the end of the project.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
