PODS: Context-Aware Service Delegation and Adaptation in the Collaborative Edge Cloud

The growth of capabilities of mobile devices allows them to host increasingly sophisticated applications. These capabilities have piqued interest in domains such as automotive, gaming, or 5G-based telecommunications, in use cases where hosting services in mobile devices is no longer a mere option, but has become a necessity due to stringent Quality of Service requirements. In this context, the emerging Hybrid Edge Cloud (HEC) paradigm provides an infrastructure for service execution in end devices. However, the highly dynamic and distributed nature of end devices makes the orchestration of services executed in them an open challenge; paramount to the operation of the system, as devices may often need to delegate services to other devices. We present the Collaborative Edge Cloud (CEC), an extension of HEC in which service orchestration and delegation are decoupled from a service’s business logic. Moreover, as a proof of concept of CEC, we also present the Pervasive Delegation of Services (PODS) platform, an implementation of CEC that allows services to be executed in end devices and orchestrated independently of their logic in an entirely decentralized way. Our evaluation shows that PODS, and thus CEC, improves the lifetime of collaborative services up to 4.9 × relative to other approaches.