ECC: Edge Cloud Composites

With an ever increasing number of networked devices used in mobile settings, or residing in homes, offices, and elsewhere, there is a plethora of potential computational infrastructure available for providing end users with new functionality and improved experiences for their interactions with the cyber physical world. The goal of our research is to permit end user applications to take advantage of dynamically available, local and remote computational infrastructure, without requiring applications to be explicitly rewritten and/or reconfigured for each scenario and with minimal end user intervention. Edge Cloud Composites (ECC) make possible the dynamic creation of virtual computational platforms that (i) can be composed from specific capabilities - competences - of participating devices, (ii) are guided by end user-centric abstractions capturing current user context and user intent, and (iii) use dynamic methods for device discovery and ECC maintenance. In contrast to datacenter clouds, ECC participants can include both virtualized and non-virtualized devices, and in addition, services running remotely, made possible by ECC´s CIC abstractions, where C(ompetence) captures the functional capabilities of accessible devices and/or remote services, (I)ntent articulates end user desires, and (C)ontext describing the current operating environment. Concrete examples prototyped in this work include Android applications for distributed video playback, collaborative UI, and a distributed augmented reality application. For all such applications, an ECC composed from available devices, and guided by ECC´s CIC notions, obtains up to 86% performance improvements and reductions in energy consumption of up to 37% compared to running on a single device. A resultant advantage in using ECCs to run applications is the ability to avoid the unpredictable latency variations seen in device-remote cloud interactions.