Designing Overlay Networks for Decentralized Clouds

Recent increase in demand for next-to-source data processing and low-latency applications has shifted attention from the traditional centralized cloud to more distributed models such as edge computing. In order to fully leverage these models it is necessary to decentralize not only the computing resources but also their management. While a decentralized cloud has various inherent advantages, it also introduces different challenges with respect to coordination and collaboration between resources. A large-scale system with multiple administrative entities requires an overlay network which enables data and service localization based only on a partial view of the network. Numerous existing overlay networks target different properties but they are built in a generic context, without taking into account the specific requirements of a decentralized cloud. In this paper we identify some of these requirements and introduce Koala, a novel overlay network designed specifically to meet them.