Cross-Cluster Networking to Support Extended Reality Services

Extended Reality (XR) refers to a class of contemporary services that are intertwined with a plethora of rather demanding Quality of Service (QOS) and functional requirements. Despite Kubernetes being the de facto standard in terms of deploying and managing contemporary containerized microservices, it lacks adequate support for cross-cluster networking, hindering service-to-service communication across diverse cloud domains. Although there are tools that may be leveraged alongside Kubernetes in order to establish multi-cluster deployments, each one of them comes with its own drawbacks and limitations. The purpose of this article is to explore the various potential technologies that may facilitate multi-cluster deployments and to propose how they may be leveraged to provide a cross-cluster connectivity solution that caters to the intricacies of XR services. The proposed solution is based on the use of two open-source frameworks, namely Cluster API for multi-cluster management, and Liqo for multi-cluster interconnectivity. The efficiency of this approach is evaluated in the context of two experiments. This work is the first attempt at proposing a solution for supporting multi-cluster deployments in a manner that is aligned with the requirements of XR services.