Cloud@Edge: Design and Architecture of a Software Defined Edge Cloud

The Edge Cloud is a virtual data center created by the cloudification of unused compute and storage resources at the edge in homes and enterprises. The edge cloud provides an efficient way to use otherwise unused re- sources, and can be used to deliver low latency and high storage applications all the way to the edge at a sig- nificant cost savings. However, the edge cloud design raises numerous technical challenges relating to secu- rity, network connectivity, bandwidth management, re- source churn and heterogeneous resource management. We describe the design and architecture of a multi-tenant edge cloud called Cloud@Edge designed to meet these challenges. Cloud@Edge provides a fully decentralized compute and storage cloud with an SDN-like central con- troller to manage the edge resources with an abstraction of a distributed virtual data center. Preliminary measure- ments are also reported.