Web Application-Based WebAssembly Container Platform for Extreme Edge Computing

IoT devices are now used in many different fields and applications, and they generate a large amount of traffic when sending sensor data to the cloud for analysis. By offloading these computing tasks to edge computing, the network traffic on the core network and latency can be reduced. However, the resources at the edge are limited, making it difficult to respond to the rapidly expanding number of IoT devices. To solve the problem, extreme edge computing, which utilizes the computing resources of end devices for task offloading, is emerging. The conventional task execution methods in edge computing are unsuitable for extreme edge computing because of the nonuniformity of end devices and connectivity. To meet the requirements of extreme edge computing, we propose a novel WebAssembly container system that is portable, lightweight, and manageable. Our proposed system has two types of container engines working as native applications and Web applications. This enables the execution of general-purpose computing tasks on various devices with different CPU architectures and OSs. We evaluate our prototype implementation working on these devices to confirm the benefits and effects of our proposed system for extreme edge computing.