Flexible Distributed Computing Across End-Devices, the Edge and the Cloud

Abstract

The emergence of the edge/fog computing paradigm has increased the programming complexity of applications so that they can work seamlessly in the new distributed and heterogeneous system landscape. In this paper, we investigate a structured dataflow approach which simplifies application development and offers great flexibility regarding the deployment of the application across end-devices, edge computing infrastructure and remote cloud systems. Our prototype is built on top of the Node-RED framework, with extensions in order to support the transparent deployment and distributed execution of application flows. We use a real-world application example to illustrate our approach as well as to explore the performance trade-offs for different deployment scenarios on a real distributed computing setup. © 2018 The authors and IOS Press.