  With the emergence of industrial IoT and cloud computing, and the advent of
5G and edge clouds, there are ambitious expectations on elasticity, economies
of scale, and fast time to market for demanding use cases in the next
generation of ICT networks. Responsiveness and reliability of wireless
communication links and services in the cloud are set to improve significantly
as the concept of edge clouds is becoming more prevalent. To enable industrial
uptake we must provide cloud capacity in the networks but also a sufficient
level of simplicity and self-sustainability in the software platforms. In this
paper, we present a research test-bed built to study mission-critical control
over the distributed edge cloud. We evaluate system properties using a
conventional control application in the form of a Model Predictive Controller.
Our cloud platform provides the means to continuously operate our
mission-critical application while seamlessly relocating computations across
geographically dispersed compute nodes. Through our use of 5G wireless radio,
we allow for mobility and reliably provide compute resources with low latency,
at the edge. The primary contribution of this paper is a state-of-the art,
fully operational test-bed showing the potential for merged IoT, 5G, and cloud.
We also provide an evaluation of the system while operating a mission-critical
application and provide an outlook on a novel research direction.
