DFaaS: Decentralized Function-as-a-Service for Federated Edge Computing

Edge Computing pushes cloud capabilities to the edge of the network, closer to the users, to address stringent Quality-of-Service requirements and ensure more efficient bandwidth usage. Function-as-a-Service appears to be the most natural service model solution to enhance Edge Computing applications' deployment and responsiveness. Unfortunately, the conventional FaaS model does not fit well in distributed and heterogeneous edge environments, where traffic demands arrive to (and are served by) edge nodes that may get overloaded under certain traffic conditions or where the access points of the network might frequently change, as for mobile applications. This short paper tries to fill this gap by proposing DFaaS, a novel decentralized FaaS-based architecture designed to autonomously balance the traffic load across edge nodes belonging to federated Edge Computing ecosystems. DFaaS implementation relies on an overlay peer-to-peer network and a distributed control plane that takes decisions on load redistribution. Although preliminary, results confirm the feasibility of the approach, showing that the system can transparently redistribute the load across edge nodes when they become overloaded.