Performance Evaluation of Containerization in Edge-Cloud Computing Stacks for Industrial Applications: A Client Perspective

Abstract

Today, the edge-cloud computing paradigm starts to gain increasing popularity, aiming to enable short latency, fast decision-making and intelligence at the network edge, especially for industrial applications. The container-based virtualization technology has been put on the roadmap by the industry to implement edge-cloud computing infrastructures. Has the performance of the container-based edge-cloud computing stacks reached industry requirement? In this paper, from the industrial client perspective, we provide a performance evaluation methodology and apply it to the state-of-the-art containerization-based edge-cloud computing infrastructures. The influences of the message sending interval, payload, network bandwidth and concurrent devices on full stack latency are measured, and the processing capability of executing machine learning tasks are benchmarked. The results show that containerization on the edge does not introduce noticeable performance degradation in terms of communication, computing and intelligence capabilities, making it a promising technology for the edge-cloud computing paradigm. However, there is a large room for performance improvement between current implementation of the edge-cloud infrastructure and the demanding requirements anticipated by time-critical industrial applications. We also emphasize and showcase that partitioning of an industrial application into microservices throughout the whole stack can be considered during solution design. The proposed evaluation methodology can be a reference to users of edge-cloud computing as well as developers to get a client perspective overview of system performance.

Methodology for Digital Transformation with Internet of Things and Cloud Computing: A Practical Guideline for Innovation in Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises

“…Applications are also developed and deployed as isolated container modules to guarantee continuous and large-scale deployment. The details of the edge-cloud architecture application in plant walls can be checked in this study [ 32 ].…”

Plant Factory: A New Playground of Industrial Communication and Computing

“…In light of the aforementioned requirements of the plant factory, in this section, we propose a preliminary architecture as a start point for vertical farming, which is based on our previous accumulated research results and digital transformation practice in the vertical plant wall industry [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. Figure 2 depicts the infrastructures in an indoor green room where a vertical plant wall is deployed with monitoring and growth systems, which reflects the production field of a plant factory.…”

Enable the landing of Internet of Things: a holistic approach

“…Enabling IoT landing: from cloud to edge computing Figure 1.2: An overview of the edge-cloud computing paradigm used in different scenarios, e.g, smart city, agriculture, logistics, traffics, factory, power grid, and healthcare. Edge devices are connected to the cloud platform via Ethernet while the communications between field and edge devices are through heterogeneous wired or wireless protocols [10].…”

“…The system functions are partitioned into microservices that are distributed across the 5. Case study: digitalization in the vertical plant wall industry edge-cloud computing infrastructures according to their performance requirements [10]. For example, in such a system, the sensor update and remote operation of actuators are latency tolerable but shall have offline capability and hardware accessibility, therefore are deployed to the host operating system as native applications to enable interfacing with hardware and communication with the edge infrastructure.…”

“…Figure 5.5: (a) Hardware setup of a vertical plant wall system that equips with sensors, actuators, and a self-implemented edge platform. (b) The block diagram of the edge-cloud computing architecture for the vertical plant wall system.A partitioning strategy is adopted to break down system tasks into microservices which are deployed to the edge host OS, edge containers and the cloud[10].…”