Efficient Layer Sharing for Application Deployment in Edge Computing Environment

EDGE computing provides consumer electronics with faster and smarter responses, thereby enhancing user experience. Based on container technology, in a cloud-edge collaborative environment, edge servers pull images from image registries in the cloud and deploy them locally to serve various smart devices and consumer electronics. Leveraging image layer sharing can reduce the amount of image transmission, as locally cached layers on edge servers need not be repeatedly pulled. This paper investigates the rational deployment of applications on edge servers under a layer sharing mechanism. Considering a scenario with distributed multiple image registries, the objective is to minimize the total deployment time under the condition of image layer sharing. In this scenario, the application deployment problem can be modeled as a variable-value 0-1 multiple knapsack problem with partial item sharing. To address this improved knapsack problem, two algorithms named greedy minimum value based on layer sharing (GD-LSV) and greedy minimum value density based on layer sharing (GD-LSVD) are proposed. Experimental simulations using real layer dataset have proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Compared with representative algorithms, as the number of applications increases, the proposed algorithms shorten the total deployment time by up to 51.78% and reduce the total storage consumption by up to 22.79%.