Sharing Stateless Containers among MEC Applications Composed of Multiple Containers

In an MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) environment, it is suitable to compose an application as a set of containers for flexibility in resource allocation. This paper proposes stateless shared containers (SS-Containers) that can be shared by multiple applications simultaneously in an MEC environment, similar to a shared library in an operating system. It is expected that SS-Containers reduce resource consumption, shorten application startup time, and efficiently manage special hardware such as GPU. When 16 applications share an SS-Container with an encryption function, and each application contains the container with the same encryption function, the memory consumption is reduced by approximately 190 MiB. Comparing the case in which nine applications share an SS-Container that accesses a GPU to solve large-scale simultaneous linear equations with the case in which nine applications randomly access a GPU via a container inside them, the response time is reduced approximately by 57 % (39 seconds).