Energy Efficiency in Edge Environments: a Serverless Computing Approach

The paper revisits the Internet Architecture by leveraging Software Defined Networks (SDN) with Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies to allow efficient and on-demand placement of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) on a serverless platform for energy-aware function provisioning in edge environments. Edge computing is seen as critical for supporting the next generation of services and applications that demand high speeds and low-latencies though energy consumption is a matter of concern. Serverless computing as a paradigm in virtualisation is considered as a low-latency and a rapidly deployable alternative to traditional virtualisation approaches. Event-triggered serverless functions incentivise energy efficient resource usage and provide granular reporting on a function level. The research will develop a new building block that satisfies the services performance while reducing the energy consumption in edge environments.