An Edge Storage Acceleration Service for Collaborative Mobile Devices

Fueled by the advances in the Internet of Things, and the growing capacity of smart mobile devices at the edge of the Internet, we have witnessed a growing trend in research and development for edge computing and edge storage, which extends the abilities of single mobile device on the edge through on-demand collaboration among multiple geographically distributed mobile devices. In this paper, we address several technical challenges that are unique for collaborative storage at the edge due to unique characteristics of mobile devices. First, we formalize the collaborative storage problem as an optimization problem. Second, we design an Acceleration Algorithm for Collaborative Storage, called A2CS, based on the architecture of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Specifically, we use the Nesterov's Acceleration strategy and the step size rules in the process of updating variables and determining the optimal speed of convergence. We develop a novel collaborative storage policy in order to guide the whole lifecycle of collaborative storage. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments for acceleration performance analysis and validation. We show that A2CS delivers a better convergence performance compared with ADMM and ADMM-OR, and a better utility performance compared with Average Distribution Strategy and Distance Preferred Distribution Strategy.