CSR: Collaborative Research: Mobile Elastic Edge Clouds for Scalable, Low-Latency Services

智能可穿戴设备、物联网和增强现实等新应用类型有望彻底改变人们在日常生活中与技术的互动方式。虽然嵌入式和智能设备的功能不断增长，但它们仍然依赖于后端云基础设施来提供额外的存储和计算能力。然而，这些新的应用程序类型具有严格的性能要求和频繁的移动性等特征，不适合当今的集中式云。该项目将开发新的系统架构，以提高连接到移动用户的“边缘”应用程序的可扩展性、弹性和移动性。为此，该项目将探索有效支持边缘云服务所需的通信和系统架构。该项目将利用网络功能虚拟化的先进技术来提供高性能网络，并将探索支持可扩展的中间件和应用程序端点所需的通信和操作系统原语。以该平台为基础，该项目将设计捕捉移动边缘云工作负载固有的新挑战的模型。这些模型将用于指导弹性缩放算法。我们越来越依赖移动计算设备来引导我们的汽车，帮助我们与他人保持联系，收集周围环境的数据，等等。在这个项目中开发的移动弹性边缘云平台将有助于提高边缘云的可扩展性、敏捷性和效率，使它们能够支持新型的性能关键应用程序。研究人员将在这项资助的教育和研究活动中吸引从本科生到博士学位的广泛学生。将有一个项目网站（http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/timwood/projects/me2c），其中包括整个项目中产生的所有工件以及关键相关技术和论文的链接。web存储库将包括在项目过程中开发的所有源代码，指导用户使用软件的文档，以及所有已发表的论文和公开发布的技术报告的链接。项目网页将在项目结束后维持五年。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Smart wearables, the Internet of Things, and new application types, such as augmented reality promise to revolutionize how people interact with technology in their daily lives. While embedded and smart devices have growing capabilities, they still rely on a backend cloud infrastructure to provide additional storage and computational capacity. However, these new application types have characteristics such as strict performance requirements and frequent mobility that are ill suited for today's centralized clouds. This project will develop new system architectures that will increase the scalability, elasticity, and mobility of "edge" applications that connect to mobile users.Towards this end, the project will explore the communication and system architectures needed to effectively support edge cloud services. The project will leverage advances in network function virtualization to provide high performance networking, and will explore the communication and Operating System primitives needed to support scalable middleboxes and application endpoints. Using this platform as a base, the project will design models that capture the new challenges inherent in mobile edge cloud workloads. These models will be used to guide elastic scaling algorithms.We are increasingly reliant on mobile computing devices to guide our cars, help us keep in touch with others, gather data of our surroundings, and more. The mobile elastic edge cloud platform being developed in this project will help improve the scalability, agility, and efficiency of edge clouds, allowing them to support new types of performance critical applications. The researchers will engage a broad range of students from the undergraduate to Ph.D. levels in the educational and research activities of this grant. There will be a project website (http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/timwood/projects/me2c) that includes all of the artifacts produced throughout the project as well as links to key related technologies and papers. The web repository will include all of the source code developed during the course of the project, documentation with guidance to adopters on using the software, and links to all the papers published and technical reports that are released publicly. The project web page will be maintained for a period of five years after the end of the project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.