Real-time task dispatching and scheduling in serverless edge computing

Edge computing brings computing resources closer to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, significantly reducing transmission latency and bandwidth usage. However, the limited resources of edge servers require efficient management. Serverless computing meets this demand through its elastic resource provisioning, leading to the emergence of serverless edge computing—a promising computing paradigm. Despite its potential, real-time task dispatching and scheduling in the highly complex and dynamic environment of serverless edge computing present significant challenges. On the one hand, task execution requires not only sufficient CPU resources but also free containers; on the other hand, tasks are typically event-driven, with strong burstiness and high concurrency, and impose stringent demands on fast decision-making. To address these challenges, we propose a real-time task dispatching and scheduling method, aiming to maximize the satisfaction rate of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for tasks. First, we design a task dispatching algorithm named Adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning (ADRL). This algorithm can quickly decide the execution position of tasks based on coarse information and effectively adapt to the changes in available servers in dynamic environments. Second, we propose a task scheduling algorithm named Warm-aware Shortest Remaining Idle Time (WSRIT), which guides the edge servers to schedule the tasks in the request queue based on the tasks’ remaining idle time and the state of the warm containers. Considering the limited storage space of the edge servers, we further introduce a container replacement algorithm named Low Priority First (LPF) to ensure smooth container launches. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted based on Azure datasets. The results show that our methodcan improve the satisfaction rate of SLOs by 12.57∼41.87% and achieve the lowest cold start rate compared to existing methods. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.