IEdge: An IoT-assisted Edge Computing Framework

Abstract

Edge computing has emerged as a viable solution to bridge the gap between distributed Internet of Things (IoT) devices and centralized distant clouds. In particular, small-scale servers are deployed at the edge of network (i.e., edge servers) to `help' cloud servers process data IoT devices constantly generate. However, these edge servers often struggle to deal with emerging applications that require real-time data processing in situ, such as real-time facial recognition. In this paper, we present iEdge as an IoT-assisted edge computing framework that enables the seamless execution of applications across an edge server and nearby IoT devices. The seamless execution in essence has been realized by transforming platform-dependent monolithic applications to cross-platform composite applications and offloading some tasks/functions of these composite applications to IoT devices considering device context. We have evaluated iEdge using a prototype implementation with a real-time facial recognition application. Experimental results show that iEdge effectively harnesses smart IoT devices as a consolidated edge computing execution environment and enables such an application to process more video streams than typical `edge-only' computing.