EdgeWare: toward extensible and flexible middleware for connected vehicle services

The dramatic development of Edge Computing technologies is strongly stimulating the adoption of machine learning models on connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) so that they can provide a variety of intelligent onboard services. When multiple services running on the resource-constrained CAVs, how limited resources can dynamically support the desired services is of the utmost importance for both automakers and domain researchers. In this context, efficiently and dynamically managing vehicle services becomes critical for autonomous driving. While previous research focused on service scheduling, computation offloading, and virtual machine migration, we propose EdgeWare, an extensible and flexible middleware to manage the execution of vehicle services, which is open-source to the community with four key features: i) on-demand model switch, i.e., easily switch and upgrade machine learning models, ii) function consolidation and deduplication to eliminate duplicate copies of repeating functions and maximize the reusability of vehicle services, iii) build event-driven applications to reduce workload, and iv) dynamic workflow customization which enables customizing workflow to extend the functionality. Our experiment results show that EdgeWare accelerates the execution of services about 2.6 x faster compared to the silo approach and save CPU and memory utilization up to around 50% and 17% respectively, and it allows domain researchers to dynamically add new services on CAVs or easily switch to the upgraded applications for the life cycle management of vehicle services.