Scaling Performance of Serverless Edge Networking

Abstract: When clustering devices at the edge, inter-node latency poses a significant challenge that directly impacts the application performance. In this paper, we experimentally examine the impact that inter-node latency has on application performance by measuring the throughput of an distributed serverless application in a real world testbed. We deploy Knative over a Kubernetes cluster of nodes and emulate networking delay between them to compare the performance of applications when deployed over a single-site versus multiple distributed computing sites. The results show that multi-site edge networks achieve half the throughput compared to a deployment hosted at a single site under low processing times conditions, whereas the throughput performance significantly improves otherwise.