BASS: A Resource Orchestrator to Account for Vagaries in Network Conditions in Community Wi-Fi Mesh

We investigate the issue of deploying applications on a set of loosely coupled compute devices, connected through a wireless mesh, typical in community networks. Wireless mesh networks experience significant temporal and spatial variations in link bandwidth. When application components, modeled as a directed acyclic graph, need to be scheduled on such a mesh with bandwidth constraints (and variations), the problem of mapping components to specific compute nodes becomes an instance of bin packing with constraints of CPU, memory, and bandwidth limits within the mesh. To make the scheduling tractable, we propose BASS (Bandwidth Aware Scheduling System), and develop heuristics for scheduling, based on the directed graph topology of the application components. We evaluate BASS on an emulated mesh using bandwidth traces collected from an actual wireless testbed - CityLab. Detailed evaluations show that contemporary orchestration frameworks can plug in BASS to provide better end-to-end performance for the applications deployed on the mesh while reducing resource utilization.