MEC-ConPaaS: An Experimental Single-Board Based Mobile Edge Cloud

Abstract

Cloud infrastructures are extremely flexible and powerful, but their data centers are located very far from the end users. To address the limitations of these systems, many researchers are designing mobile edge clouds which complement traditional clouds with additional resources located in immediate proximity of the end users. However, currently there exists no open-source mobile edge cloud implementation which can easily be deployed over a campus or a city center to support real-world experimentations. We therefore present the design and implementation of MEC-ConPaaS, a mobile-edge cloud platform, which aims to support future research on edge cloud applications and middlewares. The system exploits single-board computers such as Raspberry Pis which are an order of magnitude cheaper than any server machine and much easier to setup in a distributed setting. We demonstrate that these devices are powerful enough to support real cloud applications, and to support further research on these topics.