Edge computing brings unique challenges as the resources on the edge are highly diverse in capabilities and capacities, and highly distributed across many users and the physical world. Existing distributed computing frameworks cannot adequately handle this level of heterogeneity and distribution. This paper proposes EdgeFaaS, a novel function-based edge computing framework to enable edge applications to effectively utilize heterogeneous resources distributed across the Internet of Things (IoT), edge, and cloud for computing.
EdgeFaaS proposes function virtualization and storage virtualization to abstract distributed and heterogeneous physical resources and provides consistent virtual interfaces for deploying and executing functions and storing and accessing data. It offers comprehensive support to diverse edge computing workflows while allowing users to flexibly adjust configurations and explore various important tradeoffs.
To demonstrate its usability, the paper presents the implementation and evaluation of three representative workflows on EdgeFaaS for video analytics, federated learning, and audio classification, using a real testbed of 100+ geographically distributed IoT devices, edge servers, and cloud services. EdgeFaaS allows users to flexibly explore the deployment configurations of these workflows over distributed and heterogeneous resources. For example, users can easily vary the function placement of the video processing pipeline across IoT, edge, and cloud resources and study the tradeoff between computation and communication costs; they can also flexibly adjust the cluster count and size in the hierarchical federated learning system and explore the tradeoff between training accuracy and speed.
Blogger's Review: The introduction of EdgeFaaS offers an innovative solution for managing heterogeneous resources in edge computing, especially in the context of the growing prevalence of IoT and cloud computing. The framework's flexibility and scalability provide significant value in practical applications, particularly in scenarios requiring rapid responses. Its support for various workflows also highlights the broad applicability of edge computing.