Enabling Fine-Grained Edge Offloading for IoT

In this paper we make the case for IoT edge offloading, which strives to exploit the resources on edge computing devices by offloading fine-grained computation tasks from the cloud closer to the users and data generators (i.e., IoT devices). The key motive is to enhance performance, security and privacy for IoT services. Our proposal bridges the gap between cloud computing and IoT by applying a divide and conquer approach over the multi-level (cloud, edge and IoT) information pipeline. To validate the design of IoT edge offloading, we developed a unikernel-based prototype and evaluated the system under various hardware and network conditions. Our experimentation has shown promising results and revealed the limitation of existing IoT hardware and virtualization platforms, shedding light on future research of edge computing and IoT.