ICedge: When Edge Computing Meets Information-Centric Networking

In today's era of explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) and end-user devices and their data volume emanating at the network's edge, the network should be more in-tune with meeting the needs of these demanding edge computing applications. To this end, we design and prototype Information-Centric edge (ICedge), a general-purpose networking framework that streamlines service invocation and improves the reuse of redundant computation at the edge. ICedge runs on top of named-data networking, a realization of the information-centric networking vision, and handles the “low-level” network communication on behalf of applications. ICedge features a fully distributed design that: 1) enables users to get seamlessly on-boarded onto an edge network; 2) delivers application invoked tasks to edge nodes for execution in a timely manner; and 3) offers naming abstractions and network-based mechanisms to enable (partial or full) reuse of the results of already executed tasks among users, which we call “compute reuse,” resulting in lower task completion times and efficient use of edge computing resources. Our simulation and testbed deployment results demonstrate that ICedge can achieve up to $50\times $ lower task completion times leveraging its network-based compute reuse mechanism compared to cases, where reuse is not available.