HLF-Kubed: Blockchain-Based Resource Monitoring for Edge Clusters

Abstract

In the past several years, there has been an increased usage of smart, always- connected devices at the edge of the network, which provide real-time contextual information with low overhead to optimize processes and improve how companies and individuals interact, work, and live. The efficient management of this huge pool of devices requires runtime moni- toring to identify potential performance bottlenecks and physical defects. Typical solutions, where monitoring data are aggregated in a centralized manner, soon become inefficient, as they are unable to handle the increased load and become single points of failure. In addition, the resource-constrained nature of edge devices calls for low-overhead monitoring systems. In this paper, we propose HLF-Kubed, a blockchain-based, highly available framework for monitoring edge devices, leveraging distributed ledger technology. HLF-Kubed builds upon Kubernetes container orchestrator and HyperLedger Fabric frameworks and implements a smart contract through an external chaincode for resource usage storing and querying. Our experimental results show that our proposed setup forms a low-overhead monitoring solution, with an average of 448 MB of memory and 6.8% CPU usage, while introducing 1.1s end-to- end latency for store operation and 0.6s for ledger querying respectively.

Keywords

• Hyperledger Fabric
• Distributed Ledger Technology
• Kubernetes
• Edge Computing
• Monitoring