CNS Core: Small: Collaborative: Coalescent Computing - New Theory, Mechanism and Platform for Adaptive Edge Computing

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By moving computation to the edge of the Internet, the emerging edge computing model promises to reduce application response time, improve user experience, save bandwidth cost, and enhance data privacy. This project will establish a new edge-computing theory called coalescent computing, where each application program runs on an integrated virtual computing system, consisting of resources from both edge devices and the cloud, which jointly support application execution according to run-time conditions. The proposed research will establish a novel framework of edge-cloud resource sharing, explore various implementation mechanisms, deploy a hardware platform for experimental studies, develop software tools to transform existing applications to their coalescent-computing versions, and carry out two case studies. Its objective is to enable user applications to seamlessly overcome the resource limitation of edge devices, while keeping the benefits of low response time, communication reduction, and data privacy that edge computing promises.This work addresses the pressing need for a generic theory of adaptive edge computing, with concrete implementation mechanisms that allow existing applications to take advantage of edge computing without complete re-design. The proposed coalescent-computing framework and its software tools offer a convenient way of transforming existing application code into distributed software with enhanced performance, response time, robustness and scalability, which all contribute to better user experience. The integrated theoretical and experimental research will advance our understanding of modern edge-computing systems. All software tools developed from this project will be made open-source to help stimulate other related research. The project also includes an education plan that introduces edge computing into undergraduate/graduate courses, recruits from under-represented student groups, and helps in club activities at the local high school.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.