Experimental Platform for Edge Computing Applications (ExPECA)

ExPECA is an SSF-funded infrastructure project targeting the development and provisioning of an edge computing infrastructure for research into novel applications and network architectures. The run time is 2019 – 2022.

Summary: While data networks are highly optimized towards today’s applications, novel closed-loop applications are emerging which require much improved network performance. Closed-loop applications refer to AI-supported human assistance systems or automatic control applications. To warrant their seamless integration into reality, most importantly the network responsiveness must be improved drastically. This can only be achieved by providing computation services as close as possible to the application, referred to as edge computing.

While edge computing is an important emerging architecture, little is known about its implications for closed-loop applications. Essentially, there is a gap between theoretical work and the achievable performance of edge computing systems in practice. It is very important to overcome this gap, which is the core motivation for this project. Through establishing a highly reprogrammable wireless networking and edge computing infrastructure, as well as providing standardized benchmarks and use cases, we hope to provide an open-access experimental infrastructure that will allow the validation of theoretical results in practice. In addition, this testbed will facilitate an environment for deriving corresponding architecture and interface consequences, as well as seeding the formation of an ecosystem in the strategically important intersection between dependable applications and emerging edge computing infrastructures.

Main code repository: https://github.com/KTH-EXPECA