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Transactions on Networks and Communications - Vol. 9, No. 5

Publication Date: October, 25, 2021

DOI: 10.14738/tnc.95.11231. Kjorveziroski, V., Canto, C. B., Roig, P J., Gilly, K., Mishev, A., Trajkovik, V., Filiposka, S. (2021). IoT Serverless Computing at the

Edge: Open Issues and Research Direction. Transactions on Networks and Communicaitons, 9(5). 1-33.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

IoT Serverless Computing at the Edge: Open Issues and Research

Direction

Vojdan Kjorveziroski

Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia

Cristina Bernad Canto

Department of Computer Engineering

Miguel Hernandez University of Elche, Elche, Spain

Pedro Juan Roig

Department of Computer Engineering

Miguel Hernandez University of Elche, Elche, Spain

Katja Gilly

Department of Computer Engineering

Miguel Hernandez University of Elche, Elche, Spain

Anastas Mishev

Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia

Vladimir Trajkovik

Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia

Sonja Filiposka

Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

Novel computing paradigms aim to enable better hardware utilization, allowing a

greater number of applications to be executed on the same physical resources.

Serverless computing is one example of such an emerging paradigm, enabling faster

development, more efficient resource usage, as well as no requirements for

infrastructure management by end users. Recently, efforts have been made to

utilize serverless computing at the network edge, primarily focusing on supporting

Internet of Things (IoT) workloads. This study explores open issues, outlines

current progress, and summarizes existing research findings about serverless edge

computing for IoT by analyzing 67 relevant papers published between 01.01.2015

and 01.09.2021. We discuss the state-of-the-art research in 8 subject areas relevant

to the use of serverless at the network edge, derived through the analysis of the

selected articles. Results show that even though there is a noticeable interest for

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Transactions on Networks and Communications (TNC) Vol. 9, Issue 5, October-2021

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this topic, further work is needed to adapt serverless to the resource constrained

environment of the edge.

Keywords: Edge Computing; Cloud Computing; Function as a Service; Serverless

Computing; Internet of Things; Review.

INTRODUCTION

The cloud revolution has introduced the concept of * (anything) as a service [1], an abstraction

allowing users to think of computing infrastructure and software in general as just another

utility for which they pay monthly expenditures. While from the user perspective the Software

as a Service (SaaS) offerings unburden them from thinking about new features, upgrades, and

even security patches, developers still have to interact with lower-level abstractions. One of the

most popular developer-oriented products is Platform as a Service (PaaS), allowing them to

more easily publish and host applications. However, not all infrastructure related aspects are

abstracted to the desirable extent and the underlying programming models have not changed;

developers still need to provide a complete software package and decide what additional

components they would like to use, such as the database product, messages queues, or caching

systems.

The recent introduction of the serverless computing concept, comprised of Function as a

Service (FaaS) and Backend as a Service (BaaS) aims to alleviate these developer problems

allowing them to focus just on the core functionality of their product. Despite its name, there

are still servers involved in this paradigm, but they are not the concern of the developers, since

the provider deals with the scaling, deployment, and runtime configuration of not only the

developer's code but the associated backend services such as databases as well. The developer

simply provides the core functionality in terms of the necessary function code (Function as a

Service) and achieves statefulness, caching, user registration, and all other backend related

services by utilizing other managed products by the provider (Backend as a Service) [2].

Even though the first commercial serverless product has been published in 2015 [3] as a cloud

service aimed primarily at web developers, quickly alternative use-cases have been identified

as well. With the meteoric rise in the number of internet of things (IoT) devices, there is an

ever-growing need for increased compute and network capacity, as well as new product

features which would enable new usage scenarios. To lower the communication latency with

infrastructure located in the cloud, the trend of edge computing has emerged, moving

computing capacity closer to the data source, reducing delays. However, from the developers'

perspective, the programming practices have not changed, with a major difference being that

they also need to account for the more limited computing capacity when their applications are

deployed at the edge compared to the cloud.

In recent years the idea of utilizing serverless computing at the network edge has emerged, thus

allowing the deployment of lightweight functions across the infrastructure. Existing cloud

providers have quickly adapted their product portfolios [4], [5], allowing users to self-host the

serverless runtimes on their own hardware at the network edge. A number of existing open- source serverless projects have also published more lightweight versions of their products [6],

[7] and completely new platforms have been proposed as well [8]. Attempts to transparently

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Kjorveziroski, V., Canto, C. B., Roig, P J., Gilly, K., Mishev, A., Trajkovik, V., Filiposka, S. (2021). IoT Serverless Computing at the Edge: Open Issues

and Research Direction. Transactions on Networks and Communicaitons, 9(5). 1-33.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/tnc.95.11231

bridge the divide between the edge and cloud by allowing cross-compatibility of the developed

functions have also been made, thus offering an edge-cloud continuum.

Although serverless edge computing is a new and dynamic research field with great potential

for event driven IoT workloads [9], there are a number of open challenges that hinder a wider

adoption. The aim of this paper is to describe these issues and outline recent efforts aimed at

solving them. To this effect, we have conducted a systematic analysis of 67 state-of-the-art

research papers published between 1st of January 2015 and 1st of September 2021, with the

intention of identifying the current research trends and open issues.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in section 0 we analyze related research to IoT

serverless computing at the network edge, and then continue to section 0 where we outline the

methodology for our survey. In section 0 we describe the identified open issues and discuss in

detail the relevant state-of-the-art research aimed at solving them. We conclude the paper with

section 0, focusing on next steps and future research directions.

Related Research Papers for Serverless IoT

Both serverless and IoT are active research topics, gathering sizeable interest from the

community because of the wide-ranging effects that they might have on people's everyday lives.

The full extent of IoT applications ranges from smart devices at home, to increased

manufacturing efficiency, and improvements to quality of life through better environmental

predictions and early warning systems. Combining this with the efficiency and easy scalability

of the serverless paradigm, augmented by the greatly reduced development effort and shorter

time to market, makes IoT and serverless an appropriate match for accommodating the

expected influx of new IoT devices.

These aspects are contributing factors to the existence of numerous review papers describing

open-research problems and disseminating existing findings either for serverless or IoT, but,

to the best of our knowledge, no paper focusing explicitly on both of those aspects has been

published yet. The aim of this review is to fill that gap and look at the serverless research

challenges associated when it is used primarily for event based IoT workloads, especially when

such workloads require low latency, and need to be performed at the network edge.

A common theme across existing literature is the consensus that the usage of serverless is

expected to skyrocket in the near future [10], [11], as solutions to the open problems are

emerging. Perhaps one of the more pressing issues for serverless computing is the difference

in the various implementations regarding the runtime environments and the variable

performance that they are offering as a result of the chosen architecture for function execution,

such as virtual machines, containers, or native execution [12], [13]. The authors of [12] propose

unikernels as a possible workaround for this problem, allowing a function to be packaged with

all of its library dependencies and hardware interaction frameworks, omitting requirements

for a base operating system or a hypervisor.

The introduced abstraction of BaaS, and its externalization in terms of the running functions is

identified as another area for improvement, resulting in poor performance for I/O bound

workloads that need to communicate with fast storage, which in this case is accessed through

network APIs, adding overhead and latency, leading to longer execution times [12], [14], [15].