HCloud: A trusted JointCloud serverless platform for IoT systems with blockchain

Abstract

Cloud computing has been exploited in managing large-scale IoT systems. IoT cloud servers usually handle a large number of requests from various IoT devices. Due to the fluctuant and heavy workload, the servers require the cloud to provide high scalability, stable performance, low price and necessary functionalities. However, traditional clouds usually offer computing service with the abstraction of virtual machine (VM), which can hardly meet these requirements. Meanwhile, different cloud vendors provide different performance stabilities and price models, which fluctuate according to the dynamic workload. A single cloud cannot satisfy all the requirements of the IoT scenario well. The JointCloud computing model empowers the cooperation among multiple public clouds. However, it is still difficult to dynamically schedule the workload on different clouds based on the VM abstraction. This paper introduces HCloud, a trusted JointCloud platform for IoT systems using serverless computing model. HCloud allows an IoT server to be implemented with multiple serverless functions and schedules these functions on different clouds based on a schedule policy. The policy is specified by the client and includes the required functionalities, execution resources, latency, price and so on. HCloud collects the status of each cloud and dispatches serverless functions to the most suitable cloud based on the schedule policy. By leveraging the blockchain technology, we further enforce that our system can neither fake the cloud status nor wrongly dispatch the target functions. We have implemented a prototype of HCloud and evaluated it by simulating multiple cloud providers. The evaluation results show that HCloud can greatly improve the performance of serverless workloads with negligible costs.