Towards Auction-Based Function Placement in Serverless Fog Platforms

The Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm has a lot of potential as a computing model for fog environments comprising both cloud and edge nodes. When the request rate exceeds capacity limits at the edge, some functions need to be offloaded from the edge towards the cloud. In this position paper, we propose an auction-based approach in which application developers bid on resources. This allows fog nodes to make a local decision about which functions to offload while maximizing revenue. For a first evaluation of our approach, we use simulation.Comment: preprint, authors' camera-ready version of a conference paper accepted in the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Fog Computing (ICFC 2020