CUE: An Intelligent Edge Computing Framework

Abstract

The worldwide popularity of smart mobile devices is ushering us into the UGC era, and the UGC data explosion posts formidable challenges and insatiable demands for network bandwidth, which can be effectively handled by the emerging EC. However, the heterogeneity of EC devices and resources should be properly addressed to process UGC data in proximity to data sources. By taking UGC features and resource heterogeneity into account, we devise CUE, an intelligent EC framework based on cloud-user-edge cooperation. First, the CUE framework establishes a shared edge structure and virtualizes heterogeneous computation, storage, and communications resources. Second, a virtual resource bank (VRB) is employed to issue virtual resource coins (VRCs) for resource exchange. Finally, the processing (i.e., computation offloading) and caching of UGC data are implemented at the network edge. Remarkably, the proposed CUE framework can fully exploit the heterogeneous EC resources, protect sensitive user data, reduce network traffic load, and accommodate the UGC prosperity in the post-cloud era. To the best of our knowledge, CUE is the very first framework for heterogeneous EC resource sharing, where UGC is innovatively involved to form closed-loop VRC recycling and to support many other promising functions (e.g., trust management and VRC monetization).