Jay: Adaptive Computation Offloading for Hybrid Cloud Environments

Edge computing is a hot research topic given the ever-increasing requirements of mobile applications in terms of computation and communication and the emerging Internet-of-Things with billions of devices. While ubiquitous and with considerable computational resources, devices at the edge may not be able to handle processing tasks on their own and thus resort to offloading to cloudlets, when available, or traditional cloud infrastructures. In this paper, we present Jay, a modular and extensible platform for mobile devices, cloudlets, and clouds that can manage computational tasks spawned by devices and make informed decisions about offloading to neighboring devices, cloudlets, or traditional clouds. Jay is parametric on the scheduling strategy and metrics used to make offloading decisions, providing a useful tool to study the impact of distinct offloading strategies. We illustrate the use of Jay with an evaluation of several offloading strategies in distinct cloud configurations using a real-world machine learning application, firing tasks can be dynamically executed on or offloaded to Android devices, cloudlet servers, or Google Cloud servers. The results obtained show that edge-clouds form competent computing platforms on their own and that they can effectively be meshed with cloudlets and traditional clouds when more demanding processing tasks are considered. In particular, edge computing is competitive with infrastructure clouds in scenarios where data is generated at the edge, high bandwidth is required, and a pool of computationally competent devices or an edge-server is available. The results also highlight JAY's ability of exposing the performance compromises in applications when they are deployed over distinct hybrid cloud configurations using distinct offloading strategies.