Fog and Edge Computing

2 Addressing the Challenges in Federating Edge Resources

Ahmet Cihat Baktir Cagatay Sonmez Cem Ersoy Atay Ozgovde and Blesson Varghese

2.1 Introduction

Edge computing is rapidly evolving to alleviate latency, bandwidth, and quality‐of‐service (QoS) concerns of cloud‐based applications as billions of ‘things’ are integrated to the Internet [1]. Current research has primarily focused on decentralizing resources away from centralized cloud data centers to the edge of the network and making use of them for improving application performance. Typically, edge resources are configured in an ad hoc manner and an application or a collection of applications may privately make use of them. These resources are not publicly available, for example, like cloud resources. Additionally, edge resources are not evenly distributed but are sporadic in their geographic distribution.

However, ad hoc, private, and sporadic edge deployments are less useful in transforming the global Internet. The benefits of using the edge should be equally accessible to both the developing and developed world for ensuring computational fairness and for connecting billions of devices to the Internet. However, there is minimal discourse on how edge deployments can be brought to bear in a global context – federating them across multiple geographic regions to create a global edge‐based fabric that decentralizes data center computation. This, of course, is currently impractical, not only because of technical challenges ...