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.

翻译：在边缘设备集群中，节点间延迟是直接影响应用性能的关键挑战。本文通过实测分布式无服务器应用在真实世界测试平台中的吞吐量，实验性地分析了节点间延迟对应用性能的影响。我们在Kubernetes节点集群上部署Knative，并通过模拟节点间的网络延迟，对比了应用部署在单站点与多分布式计算站点时的性能差异。结果表明，在低处理时间条件下，多站点边缘网络的吞吐量仅为单站点部署的一半，而在高处理时间条件下，其吞吐性能则显著提升。