An Edge Computing Architecture Based on Unikernel

In the era of big data, more and more applications of smart devices are computing-intensive, thus raising the strong demand for task offloading to cloud data centers. However, it gives rise to network delay and privacy data leak issues. Edge computing can effectively solve latency, bandwidth occupation and data privacy problems, but the deployment of applications are also limited by hardware architectures and resources, i.e., computing and storage resources. Therefore, the combination of virtualization technology and edge computing become important in order to realize the rapid deployment of intelligent application in an edge server or an edge node by virtualization technology. The traditional virtual machine (VM) is no longer suitable for resource-constrained devices. Container technique including Docker can effectively solve these problems, but it also depends on an operating system. Unikernel is the state-of-art virtualization technology. In this paper, we combine Unikernel with edge computing to explore its application in an edge computing system. An application architecture of edge computing based on Unikernel is proposed. It is suitable for application in edge computing.