Towards Service Discovery and Invocation in Data-Centric Edge Networks

The efforts exploring Named Data Networking (NDN) have mainly focused on addressing the lack of scalable data distribution by today’s Internet. In this paper, we argue that NDN offers a richer environment for edge computing applications. We consider a scenario, where applications need to discover the services running in the edge network. We demonstrate the design and implementation of a distributed service discovery mechanism over NDN through an example use-case of a mobile application for vision impairment patient. The paper discusses three main edge computing challenges, namely service discovery, service invocation, and user mobility management, to highlight NDN’s architectural advantages for edge computing systems. Experimental results show that our framework design can effectively utilize the available resources at the network edge, being able to satisfy 95-98% of mobile users’ service requests.