Unleashing the power of decentralized serverless IoT dataflow architecture for the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum: a performance comparison

Abstract

The advent of new computing and communication trends that link pervasive data sources and consumers, such as Edge Computing, 5G and IIoT, has led to the development of the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum in order to take advantage of the resources available in massive IoT scenarios and to conduct data analysis to leverage intelligence at all levels. This paper outlines the challenging requirements of this novel IoT context and presents an innovative IoT framework to develop dataflow applications for data-centric environments. The proposed design takes advantage of decentralized Pub/Sub communication and serverless nanoservice architecture, using novel technologies such as Zenoh and WebAssembly, respectively, to implement lightweight services along the Cloud-to-Edge infrastructure. We also describe some use cases to illustrate the benefits and concerns of the coming IoT generation, giving a communication performance comparison of Zenoh over brokered MQTT strategies.