Hyrax - Crowd-Sourcing Mobile Devices to Develop Edge Clouds
Apr 2014 - Apr 2018
The number and density of wireless mobile devices today is significant and growing; in 2012, it was estimated that there were 6.8B mobile devices and that there were 128 devices per 100 persons in developed regions. Second, today’s mobile devices have more computational/storage power than the desktop/server processors of the last decade. Mobile devices have traditionally been viewed as “thin clients” or “edge devices” that serve primarily as user-input devices, but that are expected to offload the compute-intensive processing to (non-edge, back-end) servers. With technology advances, there exists the potential now to view mobile devices as “thick clients,” and going even further, to rethink them as “thin servers.” Given the proliferation and enhanced capabilities of mobile devices, it is now a real possibility for a “wireless cloud of nearby smartphones” to pose an interesting-enough collective computational/storage resource.
The Hyrax project proposes a novel vision of a hyperlocal edge-cloud, i.e., a computational/storage cloud comprised solely of a collection of nearby wireless edge devices, with the purpose of pooling these devices’ data and processing power to support a new class of proximity-aware applications that benefit the owners of these devices. The premise behind these edge clouds is that all of the constituent nodes are edge (and not server-caliber) computers, and that any and all computation is performed completely within the edge cloud, i.e., there is no offloading/tethering of the computation/data to a non-edge, back-end, traditional-cloud infrastructure. Going a step further, there might even be situations where it is impractical/impossible to offload computation to a back-end cloud because of infrastructure unavailability or bandwidth limitations, e.g., in disaster scenarios, in high user-density settings such as stadiums/concerts. Hyrax has the potential to transform the mobile and cloud landscapes, and to enable applications that cannot exist today without the type of edge-cloud infrastructure that Hyrax will deliver.
