Smart cities generate huge volumes of data to be processed by applications with different criticality and requirements. For example, a healthcare application needs lower latency when requested from an ambulance travelling to a hospital during an emergency compared to applications in less-critical domains. Cities can use Multi-access Edge Computing to reduce latency by placing applications’ services closer to users. A service placement process selects the set of servers to run the services for deployment. Smart cities challenge this selection as a large number of servers and services generate a large number of potential solutions with different QoS properties. Additionally, placement approaches must consider applications’ criticality and users’ mobility to offer an appropriate overall latency. Current approaches have considered servers’ utilisation and users’ location to place services. However, they do not consider applications’ criticality and mobile users’ paths. This paper presents MAACO, a Mobility-Aware, priority-driven, ACO-based service placement model that prioritises applications according to their criticality and minimises critical applications’ latency, while considering predicted paths for mobile users. Evaluation results show that MAACO achieves lower latency and waiting time compared against baselines at the cost of reduced load balance between the network servers.

Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) will strengthen forthcoming 5G networks by improving the Quality of Service (QoS), in particular, reducing latency, increasing data processing rates, and providing real-time information to develop high-value Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. To enable data-intensive network services and support advanced analytics, many network operators have proposed to integrate MEC systems with network function virtualization (NFV) consolidating virtual network functions (VNFs) and edge capabilities on a shared infrastructure. As of yet, this integration is not fully established, with various architectural issues currently open, even at standardization level. For instance, any update to VNFs deployed in a MEC system requires a time-consuming manual effort, which affects the overall infrastructure operations. To address these pitfalls, VNFs can be decomposed into microservices, which maintain their own states and exhibit different resource consumption requirements. This article presents an approach to integration that leverages serverless computing to merge MEC and NFV at the system level and to deploy VNFs on demand, by combining MEC functional blocks with an NFV orchestrator using a Kubernetes cluster. We further investigate whether the resource utilization of a MEC system can be improved by leveraging networked FPGA-enabled MEC servers, through an extension of the edge layer that takes advantage of available programmable hardware. We quantitatively evaluate and demonstrate the improvement of 75% end-to-end latency, 99.96% VNF execution time, 26.9% resource utilization, and 15.8% energy consumption in comparison with traditional baselines of cloud, edge, and serverless-edge test cases for a high-definition real-time video streaming application.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of resource-rich cloud services have pushed the data processing horizon towards the edge of the network. This has the potential to address bandwidth costs, and latency, availability and data privacy concerns. Serverless computing, a cloud computing model for stateless and event-driven applications, promises to further improve Quality of Service (QoS) by eliminating the burden of always-on infrastructure through ephemeral containers. Open source serverless frameworks have been introduced to avoid the vendor lock-in and computation restrictions of public cloud platforms and to bring the power of serverless computing to on-premises deployments. In an IoT environment, these frameworks can leverage the computational capabilities of devices in the local network to further improve QoS of applications delivered to the user. However, these frameworks have not been evaluated in a resource-constrained, edge computing environment. In this work we evaluate four open source serverless frameworks, namely, Kubeless, Apache OpenWhisk, OpenFaaS, Knative. Each framework is installed on a bare-metal, single master, Kubernetes cluster. We use the JMeter framework to evaluate the response time, throughput and success rate of functions deployed using these frameworks under different workloads. The evaluation results are presented and open research opportunities are discussed.

Reducing energy consumption within buildings has been an active area of research in the past decade; more recently, there has been an increased influx of activity, motivated by a variety of issues including legislative, tax-related, as well as an increased awareness of energy-related issues. Energy usage both in commercial and residential buildings represents a significant portion of overall energy consumption; however, much of this may be categorized as waste, that is, energy usage that does not fulfil a definite purpose. In the past decade, the viability of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies has been demonstrated, leading to increased possibilities for novel services for building energy management. This development has resulted in numerous approaches being proposed for harnessing WSNs for energy management and conservation. This article surveys the state-of-the-art in building energy management systems. A generic architecture is proposed after which a detailed taxonomy of existing documented systems is presented. Gaps in the literature are highlighted and directions for future research identified.