Joint Service Request Scheduling and Container Retention in Serverless Edge Computing for Vehicle-Infrastructure Collaboration

Lightweight and layered structure containers in serverless edge computing (SEC) provide flexible service configurations and computing for vehicles with diverse service requests in the Vehicle-Infrastructure Collaboration (VIC) environment. Despite progress in service request scheduling for the VIC system, the effect of layer sharing between different service images on request scheduling has not been fully explored. Additionally, the cold-start latency of service containers in SEC can significantly degrade the responsiveness of vehicle services, and container retention is proposed to minimize its impact and improve overall system performance. However, the existing research neglects the complex coupling relationship between request scheduling and container retention decisions, while focusing on the single decision optimization problem. Consequently, minimizing system costs by single decision optimization may not achieve the effect of joint decision optimization. To bridge this gap, we study the joint service request scheduling and container retention problem based on layer sharing and container caching. First, we model the joint decision problem with specific constraints and aim to minimize the long-term system cost while considering vehicle mobility. Second, an online co-decision scheme called Onco is proposed to solve the problem, which incorporates request scheduling and container retention for multiple vehicle services. Finally, both synthetic and real trace-driven simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of Onco. The experimental results show that Onco outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of system cost reduction and response time improvement.