Servlerless Mobile Edge Computing

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Current mobile networks are not able to support next generation applications that require low latency or that produce large volumes of data that can overwhelm the network infrastructure in a carrier network. Examples include wearable applications that assist individuals cognitive impairments, as well as safety critical applications, such as face recognition applications for airport security and surveillance. These applications require more computational resources than those that are currently available on mobile or embedded devices. The use of servers on the wide-area cloud, however, is also not an option as these applications require low response times, or involve processing of large volumes of data from multiple sensors and cameras. To address these challenges the research community and the telecommunications industry are exploring ways to add computation and storage capabilities to the edge of the network. These approaches, variously referred to as cloudlets, micro data centers, or fog, augment the traditional cloud architecture with an additional layer of servers that are located closer to the end user, typically one-hop away.This proposal puts forward a new vision that generalizes edge computing into a hierarchical cloud architecture deployed over the geographic span of a network. This vision will supports scalable processing by providing storage and computation along a succession of datacenters (of increasing sizes) positioned betweenthe end device (e.g., smartphone, IoT appliance) and the traditional wide area cloud datacenter. We explore the use a new cloud computing model know as Function as a Service (FaaS) as the deployment mechanism for running applications on a hierarchical cloud architecture along the the geographic span of the network. FaaS, also known as Serverless computing, is a cloud computing approach in which the cloud provider fully manages the infrastructure used to serve request, including the underlying virtual machines or containers, the host operating system, and the application run time. FaaS applications are composed of a collection of light-weight stateless event handlers that execute on a run time environment that is managed by the cloud provider. The small size and stateless nature of FaaS handlers makes them ideal candidates for our hierarchical cloud computing vision.