ComB: a flexible, application-oriented benchmark for edge computing

Abstract

Edge computing is an attractive platform where applications, previously hosted in the cloud, shift parts of their workload on resources closer to the users. The field is still in its nascent stages with significant ongoing innovation in small form-factor hardware designed to operate at the edge. However, the increased hardware heterogeneity at the edge makes it difficult for application developers to determine if their workloads will operate as desired. Simultaneously, edge providers have to make expensive deployment choices for the "correct" hardware that will remain suitable for the near future. We present ComB, an application-oriented benchmarking suite for edge that assists early adopters in evaluating the suitability of an edge deployment. ComB is flexible, extensible, and incorporates a microservice-based video analytics pipeline as default workload to measure underlying hardware's compute and networking capabilities accurately. Our evaluation on a heterogeneous testbed shows that ComB enables both providers and developers to understand better the runtime capabilities of different hardware configurations for supporting operations of applications designed for the edge.