In-Network Computing With Function as a Service at the Edge

Abstract

Offloading computation from user devices to nodes with processing\ncapabilities at the edge of the network is a major trend in today's\nnetwork/service architectures. At the same time, serverless computing has\ngained a huge traction among the cloud computing technologies and has, thus,\npromoted the adoption of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). The latter has some\ncharacteristics that make it generally suitable to edge applications, except\nfor its cumbersome support of stateful applications. This work is set to\nprovide a broad view on the options available for supporting stateful FaaS,\nwhich are distilled into four reference execution models that differ on where\nthe state resides. While further investigation is needed to advance our\nunderstanding of the opportunities offered by in-network computing through\nstateful FaaS, initial insights are provided by means of a qualitative analysis\nof the four alternatives and their quantitative comparison in a simulator.\n