Reliable Transactions in Serverless-Edge Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces ServerlessBFT, a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol for reliable transactions in serverless-edge architectures, enabling secure collaboration among edge devices and cloud providers in a scalable, trustless environment.

Contribution

It presents the first BFT protocol tailored for serverless-edge architectures, addressing security challenges and enabling reliable, scalable edge-cloud collaboration.

Findings

ServerlessBFT guarantees Byzantine fault tolerance in edge-cloud transactions.

The architecture effectively mitigates attacks and ensures secure collaboration.

Benchmark results demonstrate scalability and robustness of the proposed system.

Abstract

Modern edge applications demand novel solutions where edge applications do not have to rely on a single cloud provider (which cannot be in the vicinity of every edge device) or dedicated edge servers (which cannot scale as clouds) for processing compute-intensive tasks. A recent computing philosophy, Sky computing, proposes giving each user ability to select between available cloud providers. In this paper, we present our serverless-edge co-design, which extends the Sky computing vision. In our serverless-edge co-design, we expect edge devices to collaborate and spawn required number of serverless functions. This raises several key challenges: (1) how will this collaboration take place, (2) what if some edge devices are compromised, and (3) what if a selected cloud provider is malicious. Hence, we design ServerlessBFT, the first protocol to guarantee Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) transactional flow between edge devices and serverless functions. We present an exhaustive list of attacks and their solutions on our serverless-edge co-design. Further, we extensively benchmark our architecture on a variety of parameters.