Towards a middleware for mobile edge-cloud applications

Abstract

In the last decade, technological advances and improved manufacturing processes have significantly dropped the price tag of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets whilst augmenting their storage and computational capabilities. Their ubiquity fostered research on mobile edge-clouds, formed by sets of such devices in close proximity, with the goal of mastering their global computational and storage resources. The development of crowd-sourcing applications that take advantage of such edge-clouds is, however, hampered by the complexity of network formation and maintenance, the intrinsic instability of wireless links and the heterogeneity of the hardware and operating systems in the devices. In this paper we present a middleware to deal with this complexity, providing a building block upon which crowd-sourcing applications may be built. We motivate the development of the middleware through a discussion of real-world applications, and present the middleware's architecture along with the associated components and current development status. The middleware takes form as a Java API for Android devices that allows for the establishment of links using heterogeneous communication technologies (e.g., Wifi-Direct, Bluetooth), and the combination of these links to form a logical edge-cloud network. On top of this functionality, services for edge computation, storage, and streaming are also being developed.