DRAEC: An Adaptive Edge Computing Framework for Enforcing Operational Policy in CPS-IoT Systems

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Authors:

Jared Hall and Joe Sventek

Keywords:

Abstract:

"As Cyber Physical-Internet of Things Systems (CPS-IoT Systems) continue to advance, we have noticed an expansion of the variety of entity types deployed in these systems. With this expansion, the complexity of handling vastly different communication protocols, processes, and data within the system in a timely manner has become a significant challenge. One potential method of quickly processing this data is to push essential computation concerning the Transitional State Change (TSC) feedback loop from the cloud to the edge of the system. In this paper, we propose DRAEC, a novel edge computing framework that uses agent-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Complex-Event Processing (CEP) to significantly decrease the latency of the TSC feedback loop and subsequently increase the system’s scalability. This increase in performance is achieved by using a CEP system to synthesize discreet events from CPS-IoT entity telemetry, which our novel Dynamic Reactive Agent then uses to quickly generate and enforce controls on a user’s physical environment via a user-defined operational policy. We then present supporting results, showing that our novel edge computing framework enables a CPS-IoT control system to outperform a cloud-centric variant by 20-43x (depending on the connection type) when comparing the latency of the TSC feedback loop; it also enables support of significantly larger scale (10-100x) systems while maintaining the same level of service as the cloud-centric version."