Empowering low-latency applications through a serverless edge computing architecture

The exponential increase of the data generated by pervasive and mobile devices requires disrupting approaches for the realization of emerging mobile and IoT applications. Although cloud computing provides virtually unlimited computational resources, low-latency applications cannot afford the high latencies introduced by sending and retrieving data from/to the cloud. In this scenario, edge computing appears as a promising solution by bringing computation and data near to users and devices. However, the resource-finite nature of edge servers constrains the possibility of deploying full applications on them. To cope with these problems, we propose a serverless architecture at the edge, bringing a highly scalable, intelligent and cost-effective use of edge infrastructure’s resources with minimal configuration and operation efforts. The feasibility of our approach is shown through an augmented reality use case for mobile devices, in which we offload computation and data intensive tasks from the devices to serverless functions at the edge, outperforming the cloud alternative up to 80% in terms of throughput and latency.