5G and beyond support the deployment of vertical applications, which is particularly appealing in combination with network slicing and edge computing to create a logically isolated environment for executing customer services. Even if serverless computing has gained significant interest as a cloud-native technology its adoption at the edge is lagging, especially because of the need to support stateful tasks, which are commonplace in, e.g., cognitive services, but not fully amenable to being deployed on limited and decentralized computing infrastructures. In this work, we study the emerging paradigm of stateful Function as a Service (FaaS) with lightweight task abstractions in WebAssembly. Specifically, we assess the implications of deploying inter-dependent tasks with an internal state on edge computing resources using a stateless vs. stateful approach and then derive a mathematical model to estimate the energy consumption of a workload with given characteristics, considering the power used for both processing and communication. The model is used in extensive simulations to determine the impact of key factors and assess the energy trade-offs of stateless vs. stateful.

翻译：5G及未来通信技术支持垂直应用的部署，结合网络切片与边缘计算，可创建逻辑隔离的客户服务执行环境，这一特性极具吸引力。尽管无服务器计算作为云原生技术已引发广泛关注，但其在边缘侧的采用进展缓慢，主要原因在于需支持有状态任务——这类任务在认知服务等领域虽属常见，却难以完全适配于资源受限且去中心化的计算基础设施。本研究探讨了基于WebAssembly轻量级任务抽象的有状态函数即服务（FaaS）新兴范式。具体而言，我们评估了采用无状态与有状态两种方式在边缘计算资源上部署含内部状态的相互依赖任务的影响，进而推导出数学模型——综合考虑处理与通信功耗——以估算给定特征工作负载的能耗。该模型被用于大规模仿真，以确定关键因素的影响，并评估无状态与有状态方案间的能耗权衡。