Load-Aware Orchestrator for Edge-Computing-Aided Wireless Augmented Reality

Mobile augmented reality (MAR) has gained increased attention thanks to its potential to transform applications in different domains. One of the challenges to realizing MAR systems is the processing of video frames efficiently. MAR user devices are often resource-constrained and unsuitable for real-time object detection and recognition from video streams. Edge computing has tremendous potential to enable MAR systems, where processing instances (e.g., serverless functions, containers, or virtual machines) can implement and manage the execution of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for processing MAR offloaded video frames. One of the challenges is how to balance the video frames across the edge servers and processing instances. In this article, we proposed the LAOS orchestrator for resource management and load balancing of distributed edge servers for MAR systems. The LAOS orchestrator balances incoming video frames among processing instances at the edge servers that process video frames. It also determines when to spawn new instances of the CNN functions aimed at ensuring a predefined latency threshold for the processing of video frames. Besides, we devised a novel queuing-based framework for modeling the resource management problem of distributed edge servers for MAR systems. The obtained numerical results show that the proposed LAOS orchestrator reduces the latency and efficiently manages the edge computing resources when dynamic workload peaks are considered.