Storage on the Edge: Evaluating Cloud Backed Edge Storage in Cyberphysical Systems

摘要

Effective control of emerging cyberphysical systems such as smart transportation, smart health-care, etc. requires edge computing infrastructure that is often organized into three layers, namely edge (IoT) devices, edge controllers (ECs) and the cloud. In large infrastructures, ECs must be deployed densely in the proximity of edge devices and need to satisfy strict constraints on cost, size, cooling, etc. Thus, ECs cannot host large amounts of local storage and instead must make use of cloud storage in the background to provide an impression of large, fast local storage to host the IoT device data needed for online and real-time queries. In this paper, we provide insights into the configuration issues of such an edge storage infrastructure (ESI) based on the evaluation of commercial ESIs on several real-world edge computing workloads. We also show that the current ESI designs are lacking in several respects, and suggest some approaches for enhancing their capabilities to meet the stringent requirements of emerging edge computing applications.