GeoFaaS: An Edge-to-Cloud FaaS Platform

Abstract: The massive growth of mobile and IoT devices demands geographically distributed computing systems for optimal performance, privacy, and scalability. However, existing edge-to-cloud serverless platforms lack location awareness, resulting in inefficient network usage and increased latency. In this paper, we propose GeoFaaS, a novel edge-to-cloud Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform that leverages real-time client location information for transparent request execution on the nearest available FaaS node. If needed, GeoFaaS transparently offloads requests to the cloud when edge resources are overloaded, thus, ensuring consistent execution without user intervention. GeoFaaS has a modular and decentralized architecture: building on the single-node FaaS system tinyFaaS, GeoFaaS works as a stand-alone edge-to-cloud FaaS platform but can also integrate and act as a routing layer for existing FaaS services, e.g., in the cloud. To evaluate our approach, we implemented an open-source proof-of-concept prototype and studied performance and fault-tolerance behavior in experiments.