Efficient, Customizable and Edge-Based WebGIS System

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 126164 - 126177
• Main Authors: He, Honglei, Zhu, Wenming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Browsers; Cloud computing; Computer architecture; customizable; Customization; device-enhanced MEC; Edge computing; high performance; map tile sharing; Servers; Software as a service; Stress concentration; WebGIS; WebRTC
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3007942

Nowadays there is a wide range of applications for WebGIS which can add great value to modern economic, and building WebGIS system for specific scenarios is the common requirement of the industry. While currently separate WebGIS systems are deployed at different sites and operated by different owners, each of which has the whole set of functionalities of WebGIS, and thus introduce high cost of development and maintenance, which is a waste of resources as most of the functionalities are the same or similar. An edge computing based WebGIS architecture is proposed in the paper to meet the need of customization by applying the idea of SaaS. In this distributed architecture, the resource load is reasonably balanced between the server and the browser, which improves the overall performance of the system. Also it utilizes edge computing to reduce the pressure on the server by sharing map tiles among WebGIS clients. The proposed WebGIS system can not only be well customized and personalized as it is edge computing base, but also be well usable for large number of visits due to its distributed feature. The experiments show 5 concurrent requests per second, as well as response speed increases by more than 38.6% against traditional deployment.