A New Service Management Framework for Vehicular Networks

Mobile Edge Computing is now being implemented using Cloud Systems at the edge of the network allowing performance enhancements for user workloads. The installation of services closer to the end user promotes a readily available, low latency and high bandwidth environment which can be used to support new applications and services in vehicular environments. However, in order to support these networks, it is necessary to enable service migration which will allow services to migrate as users move around. Current service architectures do not fully provide such features and hence a new service management framework for vehicular networks must be developed. This paper explores these issues by looking at a reference architecture for services and develops a practical framework for service management in vehicular networks. A functional system looking at migration of a Network Memory Server using different migration techniques such as Docker, KVM, LXD and Unikernels is explored and results are presented which show that this approach can be used to support new applications and services in a highly mobile environment.