AUTHOR=Satyanarayanan Mahadev , Harkes Jan , Blakley Jim , Meunier Marc , Mohandoss Govindarajan , Friedt Kiel , Thulasi Arun , Saxena Pranav , Barritt Brian 

TITLE=Sinfonia: Cross-tier orchestration for edge-native applications

JOURNAL=Frontiers in the Internet of Things

VOLUME=1

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/the-internet-of-things/articles/10.3389/friot.2022.1025247

DOI=10.3389/friot.2022.1025247

ISSN=2813-3110

ABSTRACT=<p>The convergence of 5G wireless networks and edge computing enables new <italic>edge-native applications</italic> that are simultaneously bandwidth-hungry, latency-sensitive, and compute-intensive. Examples include deeply immersive augmented reality, wearable cognitive assistance, privacy-preserving video analytics, edge-triggered serendipity, and autonomous swarms of featherweight drones. Such edge-native applications require network-aware and load-aware orchestration of resources across the cloud (Tier-1), cloudlets (Tier-2), and device (Tier-3). This paper describes the architecture of <italic>Sinfonia,</italic> an open-source system for such cross-tier orchestration. Key attributes of Sinfonia include:</p><p><list list-type="simple"><list-item><p>support for multiple vendor-specific Tier-1 roots of orchestration, providing end-to-end runtime control that spans technical and non-technical criteria;</p></list-item><list-item><p>use of third-party Kubernetes clusters as cloudlets, with unified treatment of telco-managed, hyperconverged, and just-in-time variants of cloudlets;</p></list-item><list-item><p>masking of orchestration complexity from applications, thus lowering the barrier to creation of new edge-native applications.</p></list-item></list></p><p>We describe an initial release of Sinfonia (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://github.com/cmusatyalab/sinfonia" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/cmusatyalab/sinfonia</ext-link>), and share our thoughts on evolving it in the future.</p>