EdgeKeeper: Resilient and Lightweight Coordination for Mobile Edge Clouds

Mobile Edge Clouds (MEC) have been gaining significant interest from first responders and tactical teams, primarily because they can employ handheld mobile devices to form a computing cluster (for high-computation tasks such as face/scene recognition, and virtual assistance) when connectivity to the cloud is limited or not possible. High user mobility in disaster response and tactical environments make MEC challenging, as wireless links observe substantial fluctuations. Typical cloud-based coordination (e.g., ZooKeeper-based service discovery and coordination, device naming, security) cannot typically work in these environments. Driven by the need for a resilient and lightweight coordination service, in this paper, we design and implement EdgeKeeper to provide cloud-like coordination for MEC systems. EdgeKeeper provides naming, network management, application coordination, and security to distributed edge computing applications. It maintains an edge cluster among devices and intelligently stores its data on a group of replicas to guard against node failure and disconnections. We provide a full-system implementation of EdgeKeeper for Android and Linux platforms. We have integrated EdgeKeeper with existing MEC applications and performed extensive real-world performance evaluations in wide-area search and rescue operations conducted by first responders. Our evaluation shows EdgeKeeper to be lightweight, resilient and suitable for MEC.