ICN-based service discovery mechanism for microservice architecture

Abstract

Microservice architecture (MSA) is an emerging method of developing application systems in recent years. This architectural style enables better application performance, flexibility, and ease of deployment. In MSA, a service needs to acquire the location of other services in order to communicate with them. This problem can be solved by a process called service discovery, which is one of the big challenges in MSA. In this work, we propose an information-centric service discovery (ISD) mechanism which applies the information-centric networking (ICN) concept to solve the service discovery problem in a flexible way. Through analysis, we show that ISD achieves lower discovery latency and overhead compared to existing solutions of the MSA.