PROWESS: an Open Testbed for Programmable Wireless Edge Systems

Edge computing is a growing paradigm where compute resources are provisioned between data sources and the cloud to decrease compute latency from data transfer, lower costs, comply with security policies, and more. Edge systems are as varied as their applications, serving internet services, IoT, and emerging technologies. Due to the tight constraints experienced by many edge systems, research computing testbeds have become valuable tools for edge research and application benchmarking. Current testbed infrastructure, however, fails to properly emulate many important edge contexts leading to inaccurate benchmarking. Institutions with broad interests in edge computing can build testbeds, but prior work suggests that edge testbeds are often application or sensor specific. A general edge testbed should include access to many of the sensors, software, and accelerators on which edge systems rely, while slicing those resources to fit user-defined resource footprints. PROWESS is an edge testbed that answers this challenge. PROWESS provides access across an institution to sensors, compute resources, and software for testing constrained edge applications. PROWESS runs edge workloads as sets of containers with access to sensors and specialized hardware on an expandable cluster of light-weight edge nodes which leverage institutional networks to decrease implementation cost and provide wide access to sensors. We implemented a multi-node PROWESS deployment connected to sensors across Ohio State University’s campus. Using three edge-native applications, we demonstrate that PROWESS is simple to configure, has a small resource footprint, scales gracefully, and minimally impacts institutional networks. We also show that PROWESS closely approximates native execution of edge workloads and facilitates experiments that other systems testbeds can not.