The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of resource-rich cloud services have pushed the data processing horizon towards the edge of the network. This has the potential to address bandwidth costs, and latency, availability and data privacy concerns. Serverless computing, a cloud computing model for stateless and event-driven applications, promises to further improve Quality of Service (QoS) by eliminating the burden of always-on infrastructure through ephemeral containers. Open source serverless frameworks have been introduced to avoid the vendor lock-in and computation restrictions of public cloud platforms and to bring the power of serverless computing to onpremises deployments. In an IoT environment, these frameworks can leverage the computational capabilities of devices in the local network to further improve QoS of applications delivered to the user. However, these frameworks have not been evaluated in a resource-constrained, edge computing environment. In this work we evaluate four open source serverless frameworks, namely, Kubeless, Apache OpenWhisk, OpenFaaS, Knative. Each framework is installed on a bare-metal, single master, Kubernetes cluster. We use the JMeter framework to evaluate the response time, throughput and success rate of functions deployed using these frameworks under different workloads. The evaluation results are presented and open research opportunities are discussed.

Reducing energy consumption within buildings has been an active area of research in the past decade; more recently, there has been an increased influx of activity, motivated by a variety of issues including legislative, tax-related, as well as an increased awareness of energy-related issues. Energy usage both in commercial and residential buildings represents a significant portion of overall energy consumption; however, much of this may be categorized as waste, that is, energy usage that does not fulfil a definite purpose. In the past decade, the viability of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies has been demonstrated, leading to increased possibilities for novel services for building energy management. This development has resulted in numerous approaches being proposed for harnessing WSNs for energy management and conservation. This article surveys the state-of-the-art in building energy management systems. A generic architecture is proposed after which a detailed taxonomy of existing documented systems is presented. Gaps in the literature are highlighted and directions for future research identified.Additional Key Words and Phrases: Applications of sensor and actuator networks, energy management and control, modelling of systems and physical environments, sensor fusion and distributed inference, simulation tools and environments, building energy management systems, energy usage feedback and control ACM Reference Format:

The advent of new cloud-based applications such as mixed reality, online gaming, autonomous driving, and healthcare has introduced infrastructure management challenges to the underlying service network. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) extends the cloud computing paradigm and leverages servers near end-users at the network edge to provide a cloud-like environment. The optimum placement of services on edge servers plays a crucial role in the performance of such service-based applications. Dynamic service placement problem addresses the adaptive configuration of application services at edge servers to facilitate end-users and those devices that need to offload computation tasks. While reported approaches in the literature shed light on this problem from a particular perspective, a panoramic study of this problem reveals the research gaps in the big picture. This paper introduces the dynamic service placement problem and outline its relations with other problems such as task scheduling, resource management, and caching at the edge. We also present a systematic literature review of existing dynamic service placement methods for MEC environments from networking, middleware, applications, and evaluation perspectives. In the first step, we review different MEC architectures and their enabling technologies from a networking point of view. We also introduce different cache deployment solutions in network architectures and discuss their design considerations. The second step investigates dynamic service placement methods from a middleware viewpoint. We review different service packaging technologies and discuss their trade-offs. We also survey the methods and identify eight research directions that researchers follow. Our study categorises the research objectives into six main classes, proposing a taxonomy of design objectives for the dynamic service placement problem. We also investigate the reported methods and devise a solutions taxonomy comprising six criteria. In the third step, we concentrate on the application layer and introduce the applications that can take advantage of dynamic service placement. The fourth step investigates evaluation environments used to validate the solutions, including simulators and testbeds. We introduce real-world datasets such as edge server locations, mobility traces, and service requests used to evaluate the methods. We compile a list of open issues and challenges categorised by various viewpoints in the last step.

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