*LESS ‘22 (a.k.a. STARLESS ‘22) is the 1st Workshop on Serverless computing for pervasive cloud-edge-device systems and services, co-located with IEEE Percom ‘22 (March 21–25, 2022, Pisa, Italy)

*LESS is a unique opportunity to challenge the current serverless design and platforms with issues specific to decentralized and pervasive systems, applications, and services. The workshop will help to raise the awareness on serverless and FaaS in the PerCom community and attract serverless experts from the networking, virtualization, and cloud computing scientific areas.

Despite the commercial success, there are several open research challenges in the area of serverless/FaaS such as, the handling of stateful functions, support for function composition patterns beyond simple chaining, how to exploit data locality, or the mitigation of cold-start effects.

Furthermore, the rise in popularity of serverless/FaaS has led many researchers in the community to wonder whether this concept can be applied also outside of cloud computing. Internet of Things (IoT) applications could benefit from the FaaS programming model, but they are usually deployed on edge systems, which adds several challenges: there is no single entry point for all function invocations, hardware-software configurations are heterogeneous, or the mapping of advanced AI patterns (e.g. federated learning) is unclear.

*LESS ‘22 solicits research contributions in the following areas:

- Pervasive applications and services. Serverless is becoming the de facto standard for deploying new mobile applications, but the opportunities that can be unlocked by this paradigm in relation to pervasive applications and services have not yet been fully explored.

- Pervasive deployments. The application of serverless to edge systems and opportunistic computing on user devices is a thriving research area, which may enable new applications that today cannot be realized or boost the adoption of applications that today have scalability issues with traditional tools.

- Distributed computing. The FaaS programming model is a powerful abstraction, which already today fits many applications of business interest. It is, however, unclear whether the abstraction is sufficient for most or all pervasive applications relying on some form of distributed computing (e.g., management of the state of functions).

- Pervasive networking. Serverless platforms rely on an underlying abstraction of the network, which is designed and optimised for relatively small data transfers, but pervasive applications and systems may be more data-intensive.

- Pervasive analytics. Many pervasive applications rely on AI/ML for automated detection and decision-making. The role of serverless and FaaS in this domain has not been defined yet, even though they can promise significant benefits in terms of simpler management and automatic scaling.

- Energy Efficiency. The stateless, event-driven, and distributed mindset triggered by serverless could make it suitable for the adoption in edge computing, where low-power hardware and energy harvesting technologies are key enablers for scenarios such as remote areas.

Specific topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

+ Serverless computing in edge, fog, and cloud architectures
+ Serverless computing for pervasive systems, applications, and services
+ Protocols for distributed serverless computing
+ Serverless computing in emerging communication patterns, e.g., 6G
+ Function-as-a-service (FaaS) for pervasive applications
+ Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with/for serverless computing
+ Performance evaluation of serverless computing in pervasive scenarios
+ Modelling, analysis, and simulation of pervasive systems using serverless computing
+ Prototypes and real-life experiments involving serverless computing for pervasive systems
+ Technical-economic analysis of serverless/FaaS for pervasive computing business cases

Important dates

Submission due: November 14, 2021
Notification of acceptance: January 5, 2022
Camera ready due: February 5, 2022
Workshop date: March 21 or March 25, 2022 [TBD]

Submission guidelines

Papers must be in PDF format and contain 6 pages maximum (including references), but also shorter submissions are welcome. Papers should contain names and affiliations of the authors (not blinded). All papers must be typeset in double-column IEEE format using 10pt fonts on US letter paper, with all fonts embedded. Submissions must be made via EDAS (link to be announced). The IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates, as well as related information, can be found at the IEEE Computer Society website.

*LESS will be held in conjunction with IEEE Percom 2022. All accepted papers will be included in the Percom workshops proceedings and included and indexed in the IEEE digital library Xplore. At least one author will be required to have a full registration in the Percom 2022 conference and present the paper during the workshop (either remotely or in location).