Firework: Data Processing and Sharing for Hybrid Cloud-Edge Analytics

Now we are entering the era of the Internet of Everything (IoE) and billions of sensors and actuators are connected to the network. As one of the most sophisticated IoE applications, real-time video analytics is promising to significantly improve public safety, business intelligence, and healthcare & life science, among others. However, cloud-centric video analytics requires that all video data must be preloaded to a centralized cluster or the cloud, which suffers from high response latency and high cost of data transmission, given the scale of zettabytes of video data generated by IoE devices. Moreover, video data is rarely shared among multiple stakeholders due to various concerns, which restricts the practical deployment of video analytics that takes advantages of many data sources to make smart decisions. Furthermore, there is no efficient programming interface for developers and users to easily program and deploy IoE applications across geographically distributed computation resources. In this paper, we present a new computing framework, Firework, which facilitates distributed data processing and sharing for IoE applications via a virtual shared data view and service composition. We designed an easy-to-use programming interface for Firework to allow developers to program on Firework. This paper describes the system design, implementation, and programming interface of Firework. The experimental results of a video analytics application demonstrate that Firework reduces up to 19.52 percent of response latency and at least 72.77 percent of network bandwidth cost, compared to a cloud-centric solution.