Virtual Local-Hub: A Service Platform on the Edge of Networks for Wearable Devices

Abstract

With the rapid development of sensing and communication capacities, wearable technology, one of the most significant trends in the mobile computing evolution, has been changing our daily life. Wearable devices generally require a powerful local hub to replenish computing capacities for advanced features. However, it is inconvenient to carry the local hub in many situations, even though more and more wearable devices are equipped with a WiFi/cellular interface, enabling them to exchange data with the local hub through the Internet, However, this results in long response time and functional limitations. To overcome the restriction of a physical local hub, we propose a VLH solution, which utilizes network equipment nearby (e.g., a WiFi hotspot or cellular base station) as the local hub. In this article, we first describe the operating mechanism of a local hub and give an overview of the VLH system. Then we describe the system design of the VLH, including the container-based virtualization and the modified microservice architecture which enables remote function module sharing in the fog-computing environment. We then propose an algorithm to deal with function module allocation and sharing decisions. Finally, we demonstrate and verify the effectiveness and practicality of VLH via both simulations under large-scale network setting and real-world prototype implementation.