Robust Intra-Slice Migration in Fog Computing

Abstract

Low latency is critical to applications such as control of unmanned aerial vehicles. Such latency-sensitive services can be hosted closer to the user at the fog layer which can reduce overall latency through the reduction of transmission time and network congestion. To keep the latency low for mobile users connected to services deployed at the fog, these services need to be constantly migrated to follow the users. Unlike the cloud nodes, fog nodes are less reliable and are therefore subject to higher failure rate. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the post-copy live migration algorithm to make it robust against failure. Simulation results show that robust migration reduces total migration time between 10-26% and downtime between 2-23% compared to non-robust migration. Furthermore, when the bandwidth to the backup node is lower, robust migration provides further improvement in both metrics.