R-Drive: Resilient Data Storage and Sharing for Mobile Edge Clouds

Abstract

Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) systems are currently being developed and gaining popularity for disaster response applications and for tactical environments as they enable intensive computation and data storage tasks at the edge. MEC applications for these scenarios generate and process significant mission-critical and personal data that require resilient and secure storage and sharing. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of R-Drive, an adaptive erasure-coded and encrypted resilient data storage and sharing frame-work for disaster response and tactical MEC applications. R-Drive adaptively chooses erasure coding parameters to ensure the highest data availability with a minimal storage cost. R-Drive's distributed directory service provides a resilient and secure namespace for files with rigorous access control management. R-Drive leverages opportunistic networking, allowing data storage and sharing in mobile and loosely connected MEC environments. We implemented R-Drive on Android and integrated it with existing MEC applications. Performance evaluation results show that R-Drive enables resilient data storage and sharing.