EdgeStore: Leveraging Edge Devices for Mobile Storage Offloading

Abstract

The recent growth in smart phone adoption coupled with social networking has lead to an increase in user generated content (UGC). The majority of UGC, captured in the form of images, videos, and audio clips, have significantly grown in size as a result of advancements in multimedia technology with higher definition phone cameras. Online clouds are generally the go-to solution in order to accommodate this increase in storage requirements. However, online clouds raise privacy concerns, are not fully automated, and do not adapt to different networking environments. We propose an edge based automated storage management system, EdgeStore, that utilizes user-owned devices at the edge, to automatically offload and retrieve files. EdgeStore determines file popularity based on the user's access patterns and offloads unpopular files. It accounts for different networking infrastructures, ranging from rural areas to metropolitan areas, in order to serve users in different environments. We implement and evaluate EdgeStore showing that users can offload up to 90% of storage to underutilized edge devices, and still have a high percentage of low latency access to offloaded files within 10 seconds.