A Microservice Store for Efficient Edge Offloading

Current edge computing frameworks require tight coupling between mobile clients and surrogates, i.e., the offloaded code has been preconfigured with its required execution environment. In many cases, this includes prior transfers of code blocks or execution environments from mobile devices to the offloading infrastructure. This approach incurs additional latency and is detrimental for the energy consumption of the mobile devices. In this paper, we propose the concept of a microservice store. Using the microservice abstraction common in software development and following the serverless paradigm, we envision a repository through which said services are made accessible to developers and can be re-used across applications. We implement a proof-of-concept edge computing system based on a microservice repository and demonstrate its benefits with real-world applications on mobile devices. Our results show that we were able to reduce latencies by up to 14x and save up to 94% of battery life.