Bornholdt, HeikoHeikoBornholdtRöbert, KevinKevinRöbertSchulte, StefanStefanSchulteEdinger, JanickJanickEdingerFischer, MathiasMathiasFischer2025-05-282025-05-282025-03-3140th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2025979-8-4007-0629-5https://hdl.handle.net/11420/55722The demand for low latency, bandwidth efficiency, and privacy has driven distributed applications to the network edge, where heterogeneous, and untrusted, and uncontrolled networks pose challenges. This paper presents a software-defined overlay networking (SDON) middleware that simplifies application development through centralized control of edge resources while addressing many challenges prevalent at the edge. SDON enables applications to specify high-level requirements, such as service placement and communication goals. These are automatically translated into device-specific configurations and deployed on appropriate edge resources. The middleware is implemented as fully functional software, published as open-source, and will be evaluated in multiple edge computing use cases, to demonstrate its application optimization potential.enTechnology::600: TechnologyConference Paper10.1145/3672608.3707729Conference Paper