Dynamic Allocation of Serverless Functions in IoT Environments

TL;DR

This paper proposes a dynamic system for allocating serverless functions in IoT environments, optimizing execution location between local, fog, and cloud layers based on performance metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamic allocation method for serverless functions in IoT, leveraging local, fog, and cloud resources adaptively.

Findings

Improved response time by local execution

Reduced cloud resource utilization

Adaptive function placement based on metrics

Abstract

The IoT area has grown significantly in the last few years and is expected to reach a gigantic amount of 50 billion devices by 2020. The appearance of serverless architectures, specifically highlighting FaaS, raises the question of the of using such in IoT environments. Combining IoT with a serverless architectural design can be effective when trying to make use of the local processing power that exists in a local network of IoT devices and creating a fog layer that leverages computational capabilities that are closer to the end-user. In this approach, which is placed between the device and the serverless function, when a device requests for the execution of a serverless function will decide based on previous metrics of execution if the serverless function should be executed locally, in the fog layer of a local network of IoT devices, or if it should be executed remotely, in one of the available cloud servers. Therefore, this approach allows to dynamically allocating functions to the most suitable layer.