Open FaaS-based Multi-edge Management Framework

Mobile edge computing(MEC) is a cutting-edge technology that utilizes the computing power provided by edge nodes close to mobile devices to improve performance.Some existing state-of-the-art computation offloading mechanisms support dynamic offloading of applications at the function granularity.Function as a service(FaaS),as a typical paradigm of the serverless architecture,enables a new way of building and scaling applications at function granularity.FaaS provides ideal resource elasticity compared to traditional approaches.OpenFaaS,as a popular open-source FaaS project,enables a good foundation for building FaaS platforms.Integrating advanced computation offload mechanism with FaaS solution(OpenFaaS) is meaningful and challenging.To this end,a multi-edge management framework based on OpenFaaS is designed and implemented in the paper.The framework rea-lizes the construction and status management of OpenFaaS on multiple edges.Also,for the functions that need to be deployed,they are reconstructed and then are deployed to OpenFaaS.Furthermore,at runtime,the framework is capable of flexibly scheduling function execution among multiple OpenFaaS instances.The framework is evaluated for 5 real-world Java intelligent applications.Results show that,compared to local invocation,the proposed framework saves response time by 10.49%～49.36% on average and the framework can effectively manage multiple edges.