Service Mesh Controller for Cooperative Load Balancing among Neighboring Edge Servers

Edge computing for connected vehicles is expected to become a reality. Compared to public clouds, the computing resources available on individual edge servers are limited: therefore, dynamically allocating computing resources as needed based on load is effective for the efficient use of edge server resources, and the auto-scale functionality using containers and Kubernetes is widely used. However, if the edge servers are overloaded when requests exceed their maximum processing capacity, long response delays and service outages may occur. Cooperative load balancing among neighboring edge servers is known as a method to prevent edge servers from overload, but standard Kubernetes does not have a control function based on server location or distance between servers, making it difficult to implement this. This paper proposes a service mesh controller to achieve cooperative load balancing among neighboring edge servers in an environment where container execution infrastructure controlled by Kubernetes runs on edge servers. Experimental results show that the proposed method with the service mesh controller reduces the median of response time by 96.3% compared with a conventional method without load balancing while also preventing overloads.