Ad-Hoc Edge Cloud: A Framework for Dynamic Creation of Edge Computing Infrastructures

Abstract

Over the course of the last decades there has been significant growth in smartphone penetration and capacities. This trend presently complements the rise of IoT and ever complex and smarter connected devices. On balance, considerable contribution has been made to the emergence of unprecedented computing capacity at the edge of the network, which is only expected to have a long-lasting impact with the rise of connected vehicles, robots and drones. Considering the abovementioned context, computing will cease to be confined to certain devices located into large data centers or stationary edge devices, instead it will be embedded and pervasive to virtually everything. This paper provides a comprehensive framework for distributed and decentralized Edge Computing systems dynamically formed out of edge computing resources with the objective of harnessing the increasingly available computing at the edge. In order to facilitate this, we propose an architecture for this Ad-hoc Edge Computing infrastructure. Furthermore, two critical aspects for Resource Management are evaluated in the present framework: namely scalability and implications of node volatility.