Understanding Serverless Inference in Mobile-Edge Networks: A Benchmark Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the emerging serverless paradigm has the potential to become a dominant way of deploying cloud-service tasks across millions of mobile and IoT devices, the overhead characteristics of executing these tasks on such a volume of mobile devices remain largely unclear. To address this issue, this paper conducts a deep analysis based on the OpenFaaS platform—a popular open-source serverless platform for mobile edge environments—to investigate the overhead of performing deep learning inference tasks on mobile devices. To thoroughly evaluate the inference overhead, we develop a performance benchmark, namedESBench, whereby a set of comprehensive experiments are conducted with respect to a bunch of simulated mobile devices associated with an edge cluster. Our investigation reveals that the performance of deep learning inference tasks is significantly influenced by the model size and resource contention in mobile devices, leading to up to$3\times$degradation in performance. Moreover, we observe that the network environment can negatively impact the performance of mobile inference, increasing the CPU overhead under poor network conditions. Based on our findings, we further propose some recommendations for designing efficient serverless platforms and resource management strategies as well as for deploying serverless computing in the mobile edge environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".