The Internet of Things (IoT) is offering unprecedented observational data that are used for managing Smart City utilities. Edge and Fog gateway devices are an integral part of IoT deployments to acquire real-time data and enact controls. Recently, Edge-computing is emerging as first-class paradigm to complement Cloud-centric analytics. But a key limitation is the lack of a platform-as-aservice for applications spanning Edge and Cloud. Here, we propose ECHO, an orchestration platform for dataflows across distributed resources. ECHO's hybrid dataflow composition can operate on diverse data models -streams, micro-batches and files, and interface with native runtime engines like Tensor-Flow and Storm to execute them. It manages the application's lifecycle, including container-based deployment and a registry for state management. ECHO can schedule the dataflow on different Edge, Fog and Cloud resources, and also perform dynamic task migration between resources. We validate the ECHO platform for executing video analytics and sensor streams for Smart Traffic and Smart Utility applications on Raspberry Pi, NVidia TX1, ARM64 and Azure Cloud VM resources, and present our results.
Advances in deep neural networks (DNN) and computer vision (CV) algorithms have made it feasible to extract meaningful insights from large-scale deployments of urban cameras. Tracking an object of interest across the camera network in near real-time is a canonical problem. However, current tracking platforms have two key limitations: 1) They are monolithic, proprietary and lack the ability to rapidly incorporate sophisticated tracking models, and 2) They are less responsive to dynamism across wide-area computing resources that include edge, fog, and cloud abstractions. We address these gaps using Anveshak, a runtime platform for composing and coordinating distributed tracking applications. It provides a domain-specific dataflow programming model to intuitively compose a tracking application, supporting contemporary CV advances like query fusion and re-identification, and enabling dynamic scoping of the camera network's search space to avoid wasted computation. We also offer tunable batching and data-dropping strategies for dataflow blocks deployed on distributed resources to respond to network and compute variability. These balance the tracking accuracy, its real-time performance, and the active camera-set size. We illustrate the concise expressiveness of the programming model for four tracking applications. Our detailed experiments for a network of 1000 camera-feeds on modest resources exhibit the tunable scalability, performance, and quality trade-offs enabled by our dynamic tracking, batching, and dropping strategies.
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