SyncMesh: Improving Data Locality for Function-as-a-Service in Meshed Edge Networks

Abstract: The increasing use of Internet of Things devices coincides with more communication and data movement in networks, which can exceed existing network capabilities. These devices often process sensor or user information, where data privacy and latency are a major concern. Therefore, traditional approaches like cloud computing do not fit well, yet new architectures such as edge computing address this gap. In addition, the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm gains in prevalence as a workload execution platform, however the decoupling of storage results in further challenges for highly distributed edge environments. To address this, we propose SyncMesh, a system to manage, query, and transform data in a scalable and stateless manner by leveraging the capabilities of Function-as-a-Service and at the same time enabling data locality. Furthermore, we provide a prototypical implementation and evaluate it against established centralized and decentralized systems in regard to traffic usage and request times. The preliminary results indicate that SyncMesh is able to exonerate the network layer and accelerate the transmission of data to clients, while simultaneously improving local data processing.