Towards Mission-Critical Control at the Edge and Over 5G
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With the emergence of industrial IoT and cloud computing, and the advent of 5G and edge clouds, there is an understanding that the responsiveness and reliability of wireless communication and of the cloud is set to improve significantly. The users of this infrastructure have high hopes of elasticity, economies of scale, and fast time to market for their demanding use cases on the next generation of ICT networks. To enable industrial uptake of edge clouds we must provide capacity in the networks but also a sufficient level of simplicity and self-sustainability in the software platforms. In this paper we present a research test-bed which we built to study mission-critical control over the distributed edge cloud. Through our use of 5G wireless radio we allow for mobility and reliably provide compute resources and low latency at the edge. Additionally, the software platform provides the means to continuously operate our mission-critical application while seamlessly relocating computations across geographically dispersed compute nodes. The contribution of the paper is a fully operational system which shows the potential for merged IoT, 5G and cloud. It is applied to a simple, conventional control application which does not obscure system properties or limitations behind a complex implementation. Our evaluations point to fundamental research topics on the underlying cloud native application framework and the controller.
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