DICer: Distributed Coordination for In-Network Computations

Application domains such as automotive and the Internet of Things may benefit from in-network computing to reduce the distance data travels through the network and the response time. Information Centric Networking (ICN) based compute frameworks such as Named Function Networking (NFN) are promising options due to their location independence and loosely-coupled communication model. However, unlike current operations, such solutions may benefit from orchestration across the compute nodes to use the available resources in the network better. In this paper, we adopt the State Vector Synchronization (SVS), an application dataset synchronization protocol in ICN, to enhance the neighborhood knowledge of in-network compute nodes in a distributed fashion. As such, we design distributed coordination for in-network computation (DICer) that assists the service deployments by improving the resolution of compute requests. We evaluate the performance of DICer against NFN and observe an increase in the resource utilization at the edge and a reduction in the request completion time.