Improved QoS at the Edge Using Serverless Computing to Deploy Virtual Network Functions

Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) will strengthen forthcoming 5G networks by improving the Quality of Service (QoS), in particular, reducing latency, increasing data processing rates, and providing real-time information to develop high-value Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. To enable data-intensive network services and support advanced analytics, many network operators have proposed to integrate MEC systems with network function virtualization (NFV) consolidating virtual network functions (VNFs) and edge capabilities on a shared infrastructure. As of yet, this integration is not fully established, with various architectural issues currently open, even at standardization level. For instance, any update to VNFs deployed in a MEC system requires a time-consuming manual effort, which affects the overall infrastructure operations. To address these pitfalls, VNFs can be decomposed into microservices, which maintain their own states and exhibit different resource consumption requirements. This article presents an approach to integration that leverages serverless computing to merge MEC and NFV at the system level and to deploy VNFs on demand, by combining MEC functional blocks with an NFV orchestrator using a Kubernetes cluster. We further investigate whether the resource utilization of a MEC system can be improved by leveraging networked FPGA-enabled MEC servers, through an extension of the edge layer that takes advantage of available programmable hardware. We quantitatively evaluate and demonstrate the improvement of 75% end-to-end latency, 99.96% VNF execution time, 26.9% resource utilization, and 15.8% energy consumption in comparison with traditional baselines of cloud, edge, and serverless-edge test cases for a high-definition real-time video streaming application.