Modeling the edge: Peer-to-peer reincarnated

The rise of edge computing as a new storage and compute model has already motivated numerous studies within the systems community, focusing on the choices and mechanisms of task offloading from end devices to the edge infrastructure, pricing, consistency, indexing and caching. However, it is not yet entirely clear how the edge infrastructure itself will be deployed, and, more importantly, managed. A common point of view considers the edge as an extension of traditional content distribution networks (CDN), due to its hierarchical layout, centralized ownership, and cloud back-end. In this paper, we consider a different view of the edge, as a “reincarnation” of the well-known peer-to-peer (P2P) model. We show how the edge is similar to P2P systems in many aspects, including the number, heterogeneity and limited availability and resources of its nodes, their central role in performing the system’s storage and computation, and the vulnerabilities related to tight interoperability with user end devices. We describe the similarities of the edge to both CDNs and P2P systems, the challenges that arise from these similarities, and the previous approaches to address them in both contexts. We show that the challenges that remain in applying these approaches may be addressed by viewing the edge as a larger and smarter reincarnation of P2P systems.