SDCF: A Software-Defined Cyber Foraging Framework for Cloudlet Environment

The cloudlets can be deployed over mobile devices or even fixed state powerful servers that can provide services to its users in physical proximity. Executing workloads on cloudlets involves challenges centering on limited computing resources. Executing Virtual Machine (VM) based workloads for cloudlets does not scale due to the high computational demands of a VM. Another approach is to execute container-based workloads on cloudlets. However, container-based methods suffer from the cold-start problem, making it unfit for mobile edge computing scenarios. In this work, we introduce executing serverless functions on Web-assembly as workloads for both mobile and fixed state cloudlets. To execute the serverless workload on mobile cloudlets, we built a lightweight Web-assembly runtime. The orchestration of workloads and management of cloudlets or serverless runtime is done by introducing software-defined Cyber Foraging (SDCF) framework, which is a hybrid controller including a control plane for local networks and cloudlets. The SDCF framework integrates the management of cloudlets by utilizing the control plane traffic of the underlying network and thus avoids the extra overhead of cloudlet control plane traffic management. We evaluate SDCF using three use cases: (1) Price aware resource allocation (2) Energy aware resource scheduling for mobile cloudlets (3) Mobility pattern aware resource scheduling in mobile cloudlets. Through the virtualization of cloudlet resources, SDCF preserves minimal maintenance property by providing a centralized approach for configuring and management of cloudlets.