Energy-Efficient Online Service Migration in Edge Networks

Empowered by edge computing, resources and computation capabilities provided by edge devices can be encapsulated as containerized services, and domain applications can be achieved through service compositions. When burst requests are coming to be satisfied, there may exist edge devices which are overloaded, since requests are mostly spatially and temporally constrained, and edge devices are resource-scarceness and capacity-limited. In this setting, overloaded devices should be relieved through optimally migrating one or more activated services to contiguous edge devices. Besides, sensory data gathered by original edge devices should be periodically transmitted to migrated devices for data analysis purpose. To mitigate this issue, this paper proposes an Energy-efficient Online Service Migration (EOSM) mechanism to conduct the migration of multiple services simultaneously. Specifically, a light service sharing strategy is developed to only transmit the top container layer, and a modified NSGA-II algorithm is adopted to generate one or multiple paths for the container layer and time-series sensory data migration of each migrated service. Extensive experimental results show that our EOSM strategy outperforms the state of arts techniques in mitigating overloading devices in terms of access latency, energy consumption, and request success rate.