Evaluating Webassembly Enabled Serverless Approach for Edge Computing

Abstract

The edge computing ecosystem has been evolving in the last few years. There have been different architectural patterns proposed to implement edge computing solutions. This paper focuses on serverless edge computing architecture and evaluates webassembly based approach for the same. The current state of serverless edge computing is explained followed by providing high level conceptual overview of webassembly. Webassembly performance is evaluated against native and container based applications using the current toolchain supported for ARM architecture. Benchmarking is done for different categories of applications like compute intensive, memory intensive, file I/O intensive and a simple image classification - machine learning application. This paper describes the experimental setup, discusses the performance results and provides the conclusion.