HDS: A Fast Hybrid Data Location Service for Hierarchical Mobile Edge Computing

The hierarchical mobile edge computing satisfies the stringent latency requirements of data access and processing for emerging edge applications. The data location service is a basic function to provide data storage and retrieval to enable these applications. However, it still lacks research of a scalable and low-latency data location service in the environment. The existing solutions, such as DNS and DHT, fail to meet the requirement of those latency-sensitive applications. Therefore, in this article, we present a low-latency hybrid data-sharing framework, HDS. The HDS divides the data location service into two parts: intra-region and inter-region. More precisely, we design a data sharing protocol called Cuckoo Summary to achieve fast data localization in intra-region. Furthermore, for the inter-region data sharing, we develop a geographic routing based scheme to achieve efficient data localization with only one overlay hop. The advantages of HDS include short response latency, low implementation overhead, and few false positives. We implement the HDS framework based on a P4 prototype. The experimental results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, our design achieves 50.21% shorter lookup paths and 92.75% fewer false positives.