Biblio

Edge computing promises higher bandwidth and lower latency to end-users. However, edge servers usually have limited computing resources and are geographically distributed over the edge. This imposes new challenges for efficient system monitoring and control of edge servers.In this paper, we propose EdgeVMI, a framework to monitor and control services running on edge servers with lightweight virtual machine introspection(VMI). The key of our technique is to run the monitor in a lightweight virtual machine which can leverage hardware events for monitoring memory read and writes. In addition, the small binary size and memory footprints of the monitor could reduce the start/stop time of service, the runtime overhead, as well as the deployment efforts.Inspired by unikernels, we build our monitor with only the necessary system modules, libraries, and functionalities of a specific monitor task. To reduce the security risk of the monitoring behavior, we separate the monitor into two isolated modules: one acts as a sensor to collect security information and another acts as an actuator to conduct control commands. Our evaluation shows the effectiveness and the efficiency of the monitoring system, with an average performance overhead of 2.7%.