Virtualized Infrastructure Managers for Edge Computing: OpenVIM and OpenStack Comparison

The evolution of the centralized cloud computing architecture towards the edge of the network, driven by virtualization technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), brings new opportunities to the multimedia industry. Offloading computing power to the edge, local caching, minimized latency and flexibility in the deployment of services are only some of the benefits that the multimedia can gain from utilizing the edge computing capabilities. To achieve such progress the potential elements of an edge computing framework have to be studied and evaluated. In this work, we focus on the component managing the edge resources which is defined as the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the MEC reference architecture. We analyze the time overhead which virtual machines (VMs) provisioning brings into the system. This is done by a comparison of two popular open-source VIM solutions, OpenStack and Open VIM. We discuss and compare the logical architectures of the two VIMs and present the results of their performance evaluation. We extended the open-source cloud benchmarking framework CloudBench by adding a new cloud adapter for Open VIM and used it to gather the cloud management metrics.