Mobility-aware Seamless Virtual Function Migration in Deviceless Edge Computing Environments

Abstract

Serverless Computing and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offer convenient and transparent services to developers and users. The deployment and resource allocation of services are managed by the cloud service providers. Meanwhile, the development of smart mobile devices and network technology enables the collection and transmission of a huge amount of data, which creates the mobile edge computing shifting tasks to the network edge for mobile users. In this paper, we propose a deviceless edge computing system targeting the mobility of end users. We focus on the migration of virtual functions to provide uninterrupted services to mobile users. We introduce the deviceless edge computing model and propose a seamless migration scheme of virtual functions with limited involvement of function developers. We formulate the migration decision problem into integer linear programming and use receding horizon control (RHC) for online solutions. We implement the migration system and algorithm to support delay-sensitive scenarios over real edge devices and develop a streaming game as the virtual function to test the performance. Extensive experiments in real scenarios exhibit the system has the ability to support high-mobility and delay-sensitive application scenarios. Extensive simulation results also show its applicability over large-scale networks.