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的应用类型有望彻底改变人们在日常生活中与技术互动的方式。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，这些新的应用类型具有严格的性能要求和频繁的移动性等特点，不适合今天的集中式云。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、灵活性和移动性。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进步来提供高性能网络，并将探索支持可扩展中间盒和应用程序端点所需的通信和操作系统原语。该项目将以该平台为基础，设计能够捕捉移动边缘云工作负载所固有的新挑战的模型。这些模型将被用来指导弹性缩放算法。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，收集我们周围环境的数据，等等。本项目正在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，使其能够支持新型性能关键型应用。研究人员将让从本科生到博士水平的广泛学生参与这项资助的教育和研究活动。将有一个项目网站(http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/timwood/projects/me2c)，其中包括整个项目产生的所有文物，以及关键相关技术和论文的链接。网络储存库将包括在项目过程中开发的所有源代码、指导采用者使用软件的文件以及指向所有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保留五年。这一奖项反映了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。

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.