PRICELESS: Privacy enhanced AI-driven scalable framework for IoT applications in serverless edge computing environments

Serverless edge computing has emerged as a new paradigm that integrates the serverless and edge computing. By bringing processing power closer to the edge of the network, it provides advantages such as low latency by quickly processing data for time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Additionally, serverless edge computing also brings inherent problems of edge and serverless computing such as cold start, security and privacy that are still waiting to be solved. In this paper, we propose a new Blockchain-based AI-driven scalable framework called PRICELESS, to offer security and privacy in serverless edge computing environments while performing cold start prediction. In PRICELESS framework, we used deep reinforcement learning for the cold start latency prediction. For experiments, a cold start dataset is created using a heart disease risk-based IoT application and deployed using Google Cloud Functions. Experimental results show the additional delay that the blockchain module brings to cold start latency and its impact on cold start prediction performance. Additionally, the performance of PRICELESS is compared with the current state-of-the-art method based on energy cost, computation time and cold start prediction. Specifically, it has been observed that PRICELESS causes 19 ms of external latency, 358.2 watts for training, and 3.6 watts for prediction operations, resulting in additional energy consumption at the expense of security and privacy.