Service Provisioning in Edge-Cloud Continuum Emerging Applications for Mobile Devices

Disruptive applications for mobile devices can be enhanced by Edge computing facilities. In this context, Edge Computing (EC) is a proposed architecture to meet the mobility requirements imposed by these applications in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things, Immersive Media, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. EC architecture aims to introduce computing capabilities in the path between the user and the Cloud to execute tasks closer to where they are consumed, thus mitigating issues related to latency, context awareness, and mobility support. In this survey, we describe which are the leading technologies to support the deployment of EC infrastructure. Thereafter, we discuss the applications that can take advantage of EC and how they were proposed in the literature. Finally, after examining enabling technologies and related applications, we identify some open challenges to fully achieve the potential of EC, and also research opportunities on upcoming paradigms for service provisioning. This survey is a guide to comprehend the recent advances on the provisioning of mobile applications, as well as foresee the expected next stages of evolution for these applications

Mobility-aware Software-Defined Service-Centric Networking for Service Provisioning in Urban Environments

Disruptive applications for mobile devices, such as the Internet of Things, Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, Immersive Media, and others, have requirements that the current Cloud Computing paradigm cannot meet. These unmet requirements bring the necessity to deploy geographically distributed computing architectures, such as Fog and Mobile Edge Computing. However, bringing computing close to users has its costs. One example of cost is the complexity introduced by the management of the mobility of the devices at the edge. This mobility may lead to issues, such as interruption of the communication with service instances hosted at the edge or an increase in communication latency during mobility events, e.g., handover. These issues, caused by the lack of mobility-aware service management solutions, result in degradation in service provisioning. The present thesis proposes a series of protocols and algorithms to handle user and service mobility at the edge of the network. User mobility is characterized when user change access points of wireless networks, while service mobility happens when services have to be provisioned from different hosts. It assembles them in a solution for mobility-aware service orchestration based on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and runs on top of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This solution addresses three issues related to handling user mobility at the edge: (i) proactive support for user mobility events, (ii) service instance addressing management, and (iii) distributed application state data management. For (i), we propose a proactive SDN-based handover scheme. For (ii), we propose an ICN addressing strategy to remove the necessity of updating addresses after service mobility events. For (iii), we propose a graph-based framework for state data placement in the network nodes that accounts for user mobility and latency requirements. The protocols and algorithms proposed in this thesis were compared with different approaches from the literature through simulation. Our results show that the proposed solution can reduce service interruption and latency in the presence of user and service mobility events while maintaining reasonable overhead costs regarding control messages sent in the network by the SDN controller