Efficient Storage and Retrieval of Similar Data in Edge Computing Systems

Edge computing is migrating services from remote clouds to the network edge, where a vast amount of data is also flowing into edge nodes. In this context, the Edge Data-Sharing System (EDSS) enhances service quality by enabling edge nodes to cooperate. However, the EDSS is suitable for precise search and faces the existing high overhead when many users retrieve similar data. To solve the obstacle, this paper proposes a similarity-based edge storage system, SESS, which leverages the software-defined edge network to realize efficient storage and retrieval of similarity data. We first design RealminHash, a core module of SESS, for efficient signature and and index for each data. Then, SESS calculates the storage strategy based on the similarity between data. Importantly, SESS adjusts this strategy using periodic network information to ensure load balancing. Experimental results demonstrate that SESS realizes the nearest-neighbor storage while maintaining load balancing. SESS outperforms the well-known k-means and spectral clustering methods in terms of accuracy and latency and supports millisecond similar queries.