Data Distillation at the Network's Edge: Exposing Programmable Logic with InLocus

Abstract

With proliferating sensor networks and Internet of Things-scale devices, networks are increasingly diverse and heterogeneous. To enable the most efficient use of network bandwidth with the lowest possible latency, we propose InLocus, a stream-oriented architecture situated at (or near) the network's edge which balances hardware-accelerated performance with the flexibility of asynchronous software-based control. In this paper we utilize a flexible platform (Xilinx Zynq SoC) to compare microbenchmarks of several InLocus implementations: naive JavaScript, Handwritten C, and High-Level Synthesis (HLS) in programmable hardware.