Decentralized Replica Management in Latency-Bound Edge Environments for Resource Usage Minimization

The Internet is experiencing a fast expansion at its edges. The wide availability of heterogeneous resources at the Edge is pivotal in the definition and extension of traditional Cloud solutions toward supporting the development of new applications. However, the dynamic and distributed nature of these resources poses new challenges for the optimization of the behavior of the system. New decentralized and self-organizing methods are needed to face the Cloud-Edge scenario’s needs and optimize the exploitation of Edge resources. In this paper we propose a distributed and adaptive solution that reduces the number of replicas of application services that are executed throughout the system, all the while ensuring that the latency constraints of applications are met, thus allowing also to meet the end users’ QoS requirements. Experimental evaluations through simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.