PiCasso: A lightweight edge computing platform

Abstract

Recent trends show that deploying low cost devices with lightweight virtualisation services is an attractive alternative for supporting the computational requirements at the network edge. Examples include inherently supporting the computational needs for local applications like smart cities and applications with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements which are naturally hard to satisfy by traditional cloud infrastructures or supporting multi-access edge computing requirements of network in the box type solutions. The implementation of such a platform demands precise knowledge of several key system parameters, including the load that a service can tolerate and the number of service instances that a device can host. In this paper, we introduce PiCasso, a platform for lightweight service orchestration at the edges, and discuss the benchmarking results aimed at identifying the critical parameters that PiCasso needs to take into consideration.