NFaaS: named function as a service

Abstract

In the past, the Information-centric networking (ICN) community has focused on issues mainly pertaining to traditional content delivery (e.g., routing and forwarding scalability, congestion control and in-network caching). However, to keep up with future Internet architectural trends the wider area of future Internet paradigms, there is a pressing need to support edge/fog computing environments, where cloud functionality is available more proximate to where the data is generated and needs processing. With this goal in mind, we propose Named Function as a Service (NFaaS), a framework that extends the Named Data Networking architecture to support in-network function execution. In contrast to existing works, NFaaSbuilds on very lightweight VMs and allows for dynamic execution of custom code. Functions can be downloaded and run by any node in the network. Functions can move between nodes according to user demand, making resolution of moving functions a first-class challenge. NFaaSincludes a Kernel Store component, which is responsible not only for storing functions, but also for making decisions on which functions to run locally. NFaaSincludes a routing protocol and a number of forwarding strategies to deploy and dynamically migrate functions within the network. We validate our design through extensive simulations, which show that delay-sensitive functions are deployed closer to the edge, while less delay-sensitive ones closer to the core.