Design and Evaluation of Container-based Networking for Low-latency Edge Services

Edge computing processes and stores data on user devices located at the edge of the Internet to support latency-sensitive services such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and so on. This adopts container technology to quickly initialize and deploy applications. Containers interact with each other through Plugins implemented based on Container Network Interface (CNI). In particular, the network latency is different depending on the plugin. In this paper, we study plugins to provide low-latency edge services and evaluate the effect on data processing performance when multiple plugins are used at the same time. The SR-IOV plugins showed twice throughput than the kernel-based virtual network interface. Also, it had more than 50% bandwidth regardless of the addition of other virtual network interfaces on a single connection.