Towards a Fast Service Migration in 5G

Abstract

The development of the 5G technology has been driven by the need for faster and higher-capacity networks that would be able to sustain modern, high-demanding applications and low-latency communication. For achieving such requirements, the services should be shifted towards the vicinity of the users as much as possible. In this scope, Multi-access Edge Cloud (MEC) will play a tremendous role in 5G technology by hosting various services close to the end-users. Thanks to the MEC technology, different services could be placed near the User Equipment (UEs) for enabling very low latency and high bandwidth communication, which is required by real-time applications, such as mobile broadband in vehicles that are characterized by high UEs mobility. In order to ensure the service requirement in terms of low-latency communication, those services should follow (i.e., service migration) the user mobility by placing them always at the closest MEC. Motivated by the evolution of real time applications, we propose and evaluate three different mechanisms to improve the end user experience by using container-based live migration paradigm. In these approaches, we leverage the follow-me edge concept for enabling lightweight live migration. While the two first solutions take into consideration the mobile users' paths (e.g., cars), the third one is oblivious to the users' paths. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of these solutions compared to prior works.