Latency-Aware Task Scheduling in Software-Defined Edge and Cloud Computing With Erasure-Coded Storage Systems

The collaborative edge and cloud computing system has emerged as a promising solution to fulfill the unprecedented high requirements of 5G application scenarios. Due to vendor variations, it is often difficult to manage hardware facilities in such a collaborative system. Moreover, the amount of data generated and tasks requested by end devices are increasing exponentially, which introduces storage and computation bottlenecks. To address these issues, a novel systematic framework called software-defined edge and cloud computing (SD-ECC) is designed to manage the underlying physical resources of edge and cloud layers via software. SD-ECC is combined with an erasure-coded storage system, for which a task scheduling problem is formulated by considering data access and task processing steps. Then, a joint data access and task processing (JDATP) algorithm is proposed to minimize the task response time including data access latency and task processing latency. A practical SD-ECC platform is developed on OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Kubernetes to conduct experiments with real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed JDATP algorithm can reduce 20.87% of the task response time and increase 14.16% of the remaining storage space on average by comparing it with alternative schemes.