Previous work has demonstrated that installing secondary sources at the edge of a cavity opening can reduce sound radiation through it, but the mechanisms are not clear, which is investigated in this paper by using the modal decomposition method. It is found that a double layer edge system achieves better performance than a single layer system because secondary sources at the edge of the same layer cannot excite some modes effectively and those at different heights compensate this. There exists an upper limit frequency for the systems with boundary installed secondary sources, which is mainly decided by the length of the short side of the opening. More secondary source layers at the edge will increase the upper limit frequency.