A Commodity SBC-Edge Cluster for Smart Cities

Abstract: The commodity Single Board Computers (SBCs) are increasingly becoming powerful and can execute standard operating systems and mainstream workloads. In the context of cloud-based smart city applications, SBCs can be utilized as Edge computing devices reducing the network communication. In this paper, we investigate the design and implementation of a SBC based edge cluster (SBC-EC) framework for a smart parking application. Since SBCs are resource constrained devices, we devise a container-based framework for a lighter foot-print. Kubernetes was used as an orchestration tool to orchestrate various containers in the framework. To validate our approach, we implemented a proof-of-concept of the SBC based Edge cluster for a smart parking application, as a possible IoT use-case. Our implementation shows that, the use of SBC devices at the edge of a cloud based smart parking application is a cost effective and low energy, green computing solution. The proposed framework can be extended to similar cloud-based applications in the context of a smart city.