CAREER: Enabling Edge-hosted Private Services via Unikernel-based Lightweight Virtualization

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), the existing mobile-cloud computing frameworks suffer from significant limitations, such as long communication latencies, unfriendly service deployment and communication interfaces for end devices, difficulty to scale with exploding processing demands, and incapability to enable large-scale personalized services. This CAREER project proposes Edge-hosted Private Service (EPS) to address these limitations. The approach of EPS is to deploy computation/communication middle points, each of which performs a certain service or optimization for an individual mobile user, at network edge between mobile devices and the cloud. Enabling EPSes in practice is challenging because existing technologies cannot meet the runtime requirements of EPS. The overarching goal of this project is to enable efficient EPS runtime through the adoption of unikernel-based lightweight virtualization. This research will advance the state of the art of unikernel-based virtualization and lay the foundation for EPSes by (1) realizing a scalable and backward-compatible unikernel-based embedded virtualization runtime framework, (2) providing real-time support for unikernel-based embedded virtualization, (3) enabling intuitive and EPS-friendly embedded unikernel development, and (4) supporting simple and practical unikernel-based service management. This research has the potential to contribute to the advancement of unikernels, which is a promising technology for resource-constrained embedded devices, by closing the gap between the state of the art and the practical requirements of adopting unikernels in real world. The research will achieve a series of novel and effective techniques underpinning unikernel-based virtualization, which can greatly benefit applications and services in the fields of edge computing and IoT. This project has concrete plans to integrate the proposed research with curriculum development, recruiting and supporting underrepresented students, as well as K-12 outreach activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.