Promoting Systematic Practices for Designing and Developing Edge Computing Applications via Middleware Abstractions and Performance Estimation

Mobile, IoT, and wearable devices have been transitioning from passive consumers to active generators of massive amounts of user-generated data. Edge-based processing eliminates network bottlenecks and improves data privacy. However, developing edge applications remains hard, with developers often have to employ ad-hoc software development practices to meet their requirements. By doing so, developers introduce low-level and hard-to-maintain code to the codebase, which is error-prone, expensive to maintain, and vulnerable in terms of security.

The thesis of this research is that modular middleware abstractions, exemplar use cases, and ML-based performance estimation can make the design and development of edge applications more systematic. To prove this thesis, this dissertation comprises of three research thrusts: (1) understand the characteristics of edge-based applications, in terms of their runtime, architecture, and performance; (2) provide exemplary use cases to support the development of edge-based application; (3) innovate in the realm of middleware to address the unique challenges of edge-based data transfer and processing. We provide programming support and performance estimation methodologies to help edge-based application developers improve their software development practices.

This dissertation is based on three conference papers, presented at MOBILESoft 2018, VTC 2020, and IEEE SMDS 2020.