Cumulus: A Distributed and Flexible Computing Testbed for Edge Cloud Computational Offloading

While smart devices are increasing in numbers, compute resources, and communication capabilities, current application requirements are often outpacing such hardware improvement. Recently, offloading computation to remote cloud resources or closely located computing resources, such as cloudlets or other mobile and IoT devices have been proposed. In this paper, we propose “Cumulus”, an open source platform for edge cloud computational offloading. Cumulus aims at helping engineers and researchers build, test, and evaluate their edge-computing applications, scheduling methods, etc. We present a generic and flexible architecture of Cumulus as well as a proof-of-concept testbed prototype leveraging a large spectrum of heterogeneous devices, communication methods, and OSs. The testbed consists of standalone worker IoT devices and clustered edge mobile clouds of IoT devices. We enhance Cumulus with a visualization tool that allows real time monitoring of resources used by the devices running on the testbed. We evaluate Cumulus in action by demonstrating its performance under several offloading algorithms in different settings.