A Preliminary Evaluation of QUIC for Mobile Serverless Edge Applications

Abstract

Deployment of computing infrastructures at the edge of the network will drive a revolution in integrated solutions for smart mobility in the cities of the future, thanks to the promises of reduced latency and outbound traffic. The adoption of serverless computing will help realising this vision since it simplifies management while at the same time providing the application developers with a neat and clean Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) programming model. Today FaaS relies on HTTP over TCP, but QUIC is emerging fast as a replacement because it is more robust to packet losses and it allows connection roaming: both these advantages are especially important for mobile scenarios. In this paper we report the results of a preliminary evaluation of QUIC+HTTP/3 when used instead of TCP+HTTP within a framework for decentralized dispatching of FaaS function invocations, which shows that this direction is promising and deserves to be delved further in the future.