Peer-to-Peer Approach for Edge Computing Services

Services in the Cloud-Edge continuum and Multi-access Edge Computing have received continuously increasing attention in industry and research. The majority of cloud-edge solutions, specifically those that support ultralow latency services, are based on a centrally deployed edge services orchestrator that allocates resources in all involved cloud-edge components and in the interconnecting infrastructure. Within closed, private settings, such as industry corporate environments, the dependency on an edge services orchestrator may not pose any limitation. However in a public open access scenario, the organization owning and controlling this orchestration instance may gain a dominating market position due to the dependency of cloud-edge services and infrastructure providers on this mediating instance between demand and supply. In this article, peer-to-peer approach for discovering and subscribing to edge infrastructure services is presented, utilizing multicast DNS and peer-to-peer networks. With this approach the necessity of deploying a centralized edge services orchestrator and the associated lock-in effects are avoided. The resulting overlay services model that completely decouples the services layer from the infrastructure layer is well suited to support use cases with loose Quality of Service requirements and limited user equipment mobility.