DISCO: Distributed Control Plane Architecture for Resource Sharing in Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Cloud Scenarios

This paper presents a novel control plane protocol designed to enable cooperative resource sharing in heterogeneous edge cloud scenarios. While edge clouds offer the advantage of potentially lower latency for time critical applications, computing load generated by mobile users at the network edge can be very bursty as compared with aggregated traffic served by a data center. This motivates the design of a shared control plane which enables dynamic resource sharing between edge clouds in a region. The proposed control plane is designed to exchange key compute and network parameters (such as CPU GIPS, % utilization, and network bandwidth) needed for cooperation between heterogeneous edge clouds across network domains. The protocol thus enables sharing mechanisms such as dynamic resource assignment, compute offloading, load balancing, multi-node orchestration, and service migration. A specific distributed control plane (DISCO) based on overlay neighbor distribution with hop-count limit is described and evaluated in terms of control overhead and performance using an experimental proto-type running on the ORBIT radio grid testbed. The prototype system implements a heterogeneous network with 18 autonomous systems each with a compute cluster that participates in the control plane protocol and executes specified resource sharing algorithms. Experimental results are given comparing the performance of the baseline with no cooperation to that of cooperative algorithms for compute offloading, cluster computing and service chaining. An application level evaluation of latency vs. offered load is also carried out for an example time-critical application (image analysis for traffic lane detection). The results show significant performance gains (as much as 45% for the cluster computing example) vs. the no cooperation baseline in each case at the cost of relatively modest complexity and overhead.