Latency-aware Resource Management at the Edge

The increasing diversity of connected devices leads to new application domains being envisioned. Some of these need ultra low latency or have privacy requirements that cannot be satisfied by the current cloud. By bringing resources closer to the end user, the recent edge computing paradigm aims to enable such applications.

One critical aspect to ensure the successful deployment of the edge computing paradigm is efficient resource management. Indeed, obtaining the needed resources is crucial for the applications using the edge, but the resource picture of this paradigm is complex. First, as opposed to the nearly infinite resources provided by the cloud, the edge devices have finite resources. Moreover, different resource types are required depending on the applications and the devices supplying those resources are very heterogeneous. This thesis studies several challenges towards enabling efficient resource management for edge computing.

The thesis begins by a review of the state-of-the-art research focusing on resource management in the edge computing context. A taxonomy is proposed for providing an overview of the current research and identify areas in need of further work.

One of the identified challenges is studying the resource supply organization in the case where a mix of mobile and stationary devices is used to provide the edge resources. The ORCH framework is proposed as a means to orchestrate this edge device mix. The evaluation performed in a simulator shows that this combination of devices enables higher quality of service for latency-critical tasks.

Another area is understanding the resource demand side. The thesis presents a study of the workload of a killer application for edge computing: mixed reality. The MR-Leo prototype is designed and used as a vehicle to understand the end-to-end latency, the throughput, and the characteristics of the workload for this type of application. A method for modeling the workload of an application is devised and applied to MR-Leo in order to obtain a synthetic workload exhibiting the same characteristics, which can be used in further studies.