On edge cloud service provision with distributed home servers

Edge computing has been proposed for new types of cloud services, which need computing infrastructure at the network edge. Driven by important use cases from the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, edge cloud computing has also a huge business potential. Edge computing devices are already operational in many industrial and consumer-oriented scenarios. A typical characteristic of these solutions is, however, that the hardware and software platforms in use are proprietary and closed. The interaction among the different vendor platforms, and their extension with third party services, in general, is not well supported. As a consequence, the opportunities for third party providers to build new tailored edge services on these platforms face significant barriers. In this paper we argue to build a collaborative edge cloud deployed on home servers. We position the proposed system and describe its building elements, where we use Docker containers for provisioning the services.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft