SPFaaS: Service Provisioning and Request Scheduling in a Hierarchical Edge-Cloud System under Function-as-a-Service Framework

The geographical distance between the data centers and users brings an obstacle to the centralized cloud system in serving the demands of the latency-sensitive applications of today’s era. As a result, the edge-cloud system evolves as a promising computing platform where a set of edge servers are deployed near the users. As these servers are also resource-constrained compared to the cloud, it is challenging to utilize their resources efficiently. To support the user applications, these edge nodes need to keep running various services. This paper considers hierarchically organized edge nodes and aims to effectively provision the services so that more requests can be served within the deadline. We conduct a wide range of experiments with both synthesized and real datasets and observe that the proposed strategy outperforms the state-of-the-art approach with a 41% increase in the number of requests served. In the case of the real dataset, the proposed approach beat the state-of-art and decentralized approaches by 17% and 67%, respectively. We further observe that the performance of the proposed strategy is close to that of the optimal centralized strategy.