Computation offloading of 5G devices at the Edge using WebAssembly

Abstract: With an ever-increasing percentage of the human population connected to the internet, the amount of data produced and processed is at an all-time high. Edge Computing has emerged as a paradigm to handle this growth and, combined with 5G, enables complex time-sensitive applications running on resource-restricted devices. This master thesis investigates the use of WebAssembly in the context of computa¬tional offloading at the Edge. The focus is on utilizing WebAssembly to move computa¬tional heavy parts of a system from an end device to an Edge Server. An objective is to improve program performance by reducing the execution time and energy consumption on the end device. A proof-of-concept offloading system is developed to research this. The system is evaluated on three different use cases; calculating Fibonacci numbers, matrix multipli¬cation, and image recognition. Each use case is tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 4 comparing execution of the WebAssembly module both locally and offloaded. Each test will also run natively on both the server and the end device to provide some baseline for comparison.