Tango of edge and cloud execution for reliability

The increasing cost of cloud services and the need for decentralization of servers has led to a rise of interest in Edge computing. Edge computing brings the servers closer to the end users which helps in reducing network latency. However, the presence of multiple edge servers adversely affects the reliability due to difficulty in maintenance of heterogeneous servers. This paper aims at evaluating the performance of various server configuration models in edge computing using EdgeCloudSim, a popular simulator for edge computing. The performance is evaluated in terms of service time and percentage of failed tasks for an Augmented Reality application. We evaluated the performance of the following edge computing models, Exclusive: Mobile only, Edge only, Cloud only; and Hybrid: Edge & Cloud hybrid with load-balancing on the Edge, and Mobile & Edge hybrid. We analyzed the impact of variation of different parameters such as WAN bandwidth, cost of cloud resources, heterogeneity of edge servers, etc., on the performance of the edge computing models. We show that due to variation in the above parameters, the exclusive models are not sufficient for computational requirements and there is a need for hybrid edge computing models.