Chen Chen, Manuel Herrera, Ge Zheng, Liqiao Xia, Zhengyang Ling, Jiangtao Wang

Serverless edge computing adopts an event-based paradigm that provides back-end services on an as-used basis, resulting in efficient resource utilization. To improve the end-to-end latency and revenue, service providers need to optimize the number and placement of serverless containers while considering the system cost incurred by the provisioning. The particular reason for this circumstance is that frequently creating and destroying containers not only increases the system cost but also degrades the time responsiveness due to the cold-start process. Function caching is a common approach to mitigate the coldstart issue. However, function caching requires extra hardware resources and hence incurs extra system costs. Furthermore, the dynamic and bursty nature of serverless invocations remains an under-explored area. Hence, it is vitally important for service providers to conduct a context-aware request distribution and container caching policy for serverless edge computing. In this paper, we study the request distribution and container caching problem in serverless edge computing. We prove the proposed problem is NP-hard and hence difficult to find a global optimal solution. We jointly consider the distributed and resource constrained nature of edge computing and propose an optimized request distribution algorithm that adapts to the dynamics of serverless invocations with a theoretical performance guarantee. Also, we propose a context-aware probabilistic caching policy that incorporates a number of characteristics of serverless invocations. Via simulation and implementation results, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm by outperforming existing caching policies in terms of the overall system cost and cold-start frequency by up to 62.1% and 69.1%, respectively.