CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Multi-tier Service Architecture in IoT-Edge-Cloud-Paradigms

边缘计算是一种新兴的模式，其中计算和存储位于终端物联网(IoT)设备和云之间的多个位置。这被视为下一波物联网解决方案进步的推动力。边缘服务预计将成为下一个数十亿美元的技术市场，并颠覆目前基于云计算的行业。边缘计算的全行业开发和标准化工作正在进行中，以定义相关的体系结构。在此背景下，该项目设计并实施了一个系统架构，以优化物联网设备、边缘服务器和云的多层服务协调。与典型的按应用程序优化方法不同，该项目对多个应用程序的联合、并发优化采取了独特的观点。这种体系结构鼓励开发新的分布式算法来分解物联网应用的处理语义。此外，该项目还为行业标准化工作贡献了技术和参考模型。利用边缘能力来转变物联网服务格局需要新颖的分布式算法和系统架构。这远远超出了针对单个应用程序的应用程序代码分区和计算卸载的现有方法。为此，该项目的目标是构建一个系统运行时，在自动优化应用程序处理的同时，抽象出基础设施的复杂性。在计算路径上，该项目突出了新类型的相关计算，其中相应的输入和输出相似但不完全相同。消除这一点是同时优化计算延迟和结果质量的关键。所开发的技术进一步提供了重构这些应用的处理流水线的原语。在控制路径上，该项目不同于单一客户端-服务器层中现有的以服务器为中心的控制，而是建议在嵌套服务器模型中以客户端为中心的控制，以利用多层计算能力。最后，上述技术被集成到一个系统运行时中，它进一步提供了简单的API(应用程序编程接口)和通用的系统级支持，如调度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Edge computing is an emerging paradigm in which computing and storage are placed at multiple locations between the endpoint Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the cloud. This is seen as a driving force behind the next wave of advances in IoT solutions. Edge services are predicted to become the next multi-billion dollar technology market and disrupt the current cloud computing based industry. Active industry-wide development and standardization efforts for edge computing are under way to define related architectures. Against this backdrop, this project designs and implements a system architecture to optimize multi-tier service orchestration across IoT devices, edge servers, and the cloud. In contrast to the typical per-application optimization approach, this project takes a unique view of joint, concurrent optimization of multiple applications. This architecture encourages the development of new distributed algorithms for decomposing the processing semantics of IoT applications. Further, the project contributes techniques and reference models to industry standardization efforts.Harnessing edge capabilities to transform the IoT service landscape requires novel distributed algorithms and system architectures. This goes far beyond existing approaches for application code partitioning and computation offloading for individual applications. To that end, this project aims to build a system runtime that abstracts away the infrastructure complexity while automating the optimization of application processing. On the compute path, the project highlights new types of correlated computation, where the corresponding input and output are similar but not identical. Eliminating this holds the key to simultaneously optimizing for the computation latency and results quality. The techniques developed further provide primitives to restructure the processing pipelines of these applications. On the control path, the project departs from the existing server-centric control in a single client-server tier, and instead proposes client-centric control in a nested server model to leverage multiple tiers of computing capabilities. Finally, the above techniques are integrated into a system runtime, which further provides simple APIs (application programming interface) and generic system level support such as scheduling.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.