Living Edge Laboratory
Project Overview
The Living Edge Laboratory is a reconfigurable research infrastructure at Cardiff University established to support edge computing research and enable a new class of latency-sensitive applications and computational analysis algorithms. The laboratory comprises 100 nodes, each consisting of a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, a 32GB SD card, Grove Pi and Arduino shields, and an array of environmental sensors including temperature, humidity, light, motion, loudness, air quality, dust, and camera modules. Interchangeable communication shields provide Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and LoRa connectivity. The infrastructure also includes three Nvidia Jetson Nano units, three Neural Compute Sticks, and over 200 different types of Grove sensors that can be plugged into any node. Funded by the EPSRC Early Career Equipment scheme, the laboratory enables internationally leading research in cybersecurity, real-time data processing, and communication networks.
Nodes are distributed across open campus spaces and existing laboratories, creating a realistic deployment environment that captures the variability and constraints of real-world edge computing scenarios. This extensive hardware inventory enables researchers to configure nodes with precisely the sensing and computing capabilities required for each experiment, from lightweight environmental monitoring to GPU-accelerated machine learning inference at the edge.
The infrastructure is fully reconfigurable, allowing both the capability of each node and its physical location to be modified. This flexibility supports comparative evaluation of different architectural patterns, communication protocols, and data exchange strategies using quantitative sensor data under realistic deployment conditions.
Team
