Computing at the Edge: But, what Edge?

The traditional telecommunications business is evolving towards offering a richer set of services beyond basic connectivity, leveraging on network programmability and virtualization. A versatile execution environment is required, capable of running different workloads in different locations in the network. Cloud computing is the key paradigm that allows fostering this trending change. One interesting question to solve is to what extent those computing environments have to move towards the network edge. Some services can be enabled by environments with increased capillarity, while others can be implemented in environments with more relaxed constraints (e.g., in terms of latency). This paper explores this topic by differentiating service edge from physical network edge and proposing an architecture based on the ALTO server for assisting orchestration systems in discriminating the suitable environments for each service. We present a network-flow strategy for assigning services to infrastructure elements following those precepts, together with an initial scalability evaluation of the proposed assignment solution to show its feasibility.