In this paper, we conduct an experimental study to provide a general sense of the application response time implications that inter-cluster communication experiences at the edge at the example of a specific IoT-edge-cloud contiuum solution from the EU Project ICOS called ClusterLink. We create an environment to emulate different networking topologies that include multiple cloud or edge sites scenarios, and conduct a set of tests to compare the application response times via ClusterLink to direct communications in relation to node distances and request/response payload size. Our results show that, in an edge context, ClusterLink does not introduce a significant processing overhead to the communication for small payloads as compared to cloud. For higher payloads and on comparably more aged consumer hardware, ClusterLink version 0.2 introduces communication overhead relative to the delay experienced on the link.

翻译：本文通过实验研究，以欧盟ICOS项目开发的特定物联网-边缘-云连续体解决方案ClusterLink为例，探讨边缘环境中跨集群通信对应用响应时间的影响。我们构建了模拟不同网络拓扑的环境，涵盖多云计算站点与边缘站点场景，并通过系列测试对比了ClusterLink通信与直接通信在节点距离和请求/响应负载大小维度下的应用响应时间。实验结果表明：在边缘计算场景中，对于小规模负载，ClusterLink相较于云计算环境不会引入显著通信处理开销；而对于大规模负载及相对老旧的消费级硬件，ClusterLink 0.2版本会因链路延迟产生相应的通信开销。