The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy. In this paper, we introduce the definition of edge computing, followed by several case studies, ranging from cloud offloading to smart home and city, as well as collaborative edge to materialize the concept of edge computing. Finally, we present several challenges and opportunities in the field of edge computing, and hope this paper will gain attention from the community and inspire more research in this direction.

Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

Together with an explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of cloud computing concept, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. MCC integrates the cloud computing into the mobile environment and overcomes obstacles related to the performance (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, and availability), and security (e.g., reliability and privacy) discussed in mobile computing. This paper gives a survey of MCC, which helps general readers have an overview of the MCC including the definition, architecture, and applications. The issues, existing solutions, and approaches are presented. In addition, the future research directions of MCC are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and provide ever richer functionality on mobile devices. At the same time, such devices often enjoy strong connectivity with more powerful machines ranging from laptops and desktops to commercial clouds. This paper presents the design and implementation of CloneCloud, a system that automatically transforms mobile applications to benefit from the cloud. The system is a flexible application partitioner and execution runtime that enables unmodified mobile applications running in an application-level virtual machine to seamlessly off-load part of their execution from mobile devices onto device clones operating in a computational cloud. CloneCloud uses a combination of static analysis and dynamic profiling to partition applications automatically at a fine granularity while optimizing execution time and energy use for a target computation and communication environment. At runtime, the application partitioning is effected by migrating a thread from the mobile device at a chosen point to the clone in the cloud, executing there for the remainder of the partition, and re-integrating the migrated thread back to the mobile device. Our evaluation shows that CloneCloud can adapt application partitioning to different environments, and can help some applications achieve as much as a 20x execution speed-up and a 20-fold decrease of energy spent on the mobile device.

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CloneCloud: elastic execution between mobile device and cloud

Mobile-edge cloud computing is a new paradigm to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of pervasive radio access networks in close proximity to mobile users. In this paper, we first study the multi-user computation offloading problem for mobile-edge cloud computing in a multi-channel wireless interference environment. We show that it is NP-hard to compute a centralized optimal solution, and hence adopt a game theoretic approach for achieving efficient computation offloading in a distributed manner. We formulate the distributed computation offloading decision making problem among mobile device users as a multi-user computation offloading game. We analyze the structural property of the game and show that the game admits a Nash equilibrium and possesses the finite improvement property. We then design a distributed computation offloading algorithm that can achieve a Nash equilibrium, derive the upper bound of the convergence time, and quantify its efficiency ratio over the centralized optimal solutions in terms of two important performance metrics. We further extend our study to the scenario of multi-user computation offloading in the multi-channel wireless contention environment. Numerical results corroborate that the proposed algorithm can achieve superior computation offloading performance and scale well as the user size increases.

Efficient Multi-User Computation Offloading for Mobile-Edge Cloud Computing

We describe a new approach to power saving and battery life extension on an untethered laptop through wireless remote processing of power-costly tasks. We ran a series of experiments comparing the power consumption of processes run locally with that of the same processes run remotely. We examined the trade-off between communication power expenditures and the power cost of local processing. This paper describes our methodology and results of our experiments. We suggest ways to further improve this approach, and outline a software design to support remote process execution.

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Saving portable computer battery power through remote process execution

A common problem facing mobile computing is disconnected operation, or computing in the absence of a network. Hoarding eases disconnected operation by selecting a subset of the user’s files for local storage. We describe a hoarding system that can operate without user intervention, by observing user activity and predicting future needs. The system calculates a new measure, semantic distance, between individual files, and uses this to feed a clustering algorithm that chooses which files should be hoarded. A separate replication system manages the actual transport of data; any of a number of replication systems may be used. We discuss practical problems encountered in the real world and present usage statistics showing that our system outperforms previous approaches by factors that can exceed 10:1.

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Automated hoarding for mobile computers

Conquest is a disk/persistent-RAM hybrid file system that is incrementally deployable and realizes most of the benefits of cheaply abundant persistent RAM. Conquest consists of two specialized and simplified data paths for incore and on-disk storage and outperforms popular diskbased file systems by 43% to 97%.

/pdf/conquest-better-performance-through-a-disk-persistent-ram-49wy0s5an6.pdf

Conquest: Better Performance Through a Disk/Persistent-RAM Hybrid File System

Recent research has demonstrated that portable computer users can save battery power by migrating tasks over wireless networks to server machines. Making this technique generally useful requires considerable automation. This paper describes a framework for automatically migrating tasks from a portable computer over a wireless network to a server and migrating the results back. The paper presents the framework's architecture, discusses key issues in creating the framework, and presents performance results that demonstrate that the framework is both useful and power-inexpensive.

http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/ficus-members/arudenko/PUBLICATIONS/SAC.pdf

The remote processing framework for portable computer power saving

Replication is extremely important in mobile environments because nomadic users require local copies of important data. However, today's replication systems are not "mobile-ready". Instead of improving the mobile user's environment, the replication system actually hinders mobility and complicates mobile operation. Designed for stationary environments, the replication services do not and cannot provide mobile users with the capabilities they require. Replication in mobile environments requires fundamentally different solutions than those previously proposed, because nomadicity presents a fundamentally new and different computing paradigm. Here we outline the requirements that mobility places on the replication service, and briefly describe ROAM, a system designed to meet those requirements.

http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/reiher/papers/wards.pdf

Geoffrey H. Kuenning

Papers

Saving portable computer battery power through remote process execution

Automated hoarding for mobile computers

Conquest: Better Performance Through a Disk/Persistent-RAM Hybrid File System

The remote processing framework for portable computer power saving

Replication requirements in mobile environments