Orchestrating Service Migration for Low Power MEC-Enabled IoT Devices
This work addresses latency and power efficiency for IoT devices in 5G edge computing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies like Kubernetes and MEC.
The paper demonstrates reactive service migration for low-power MEC-enabled IoT devices using Kubernetes orchestration, showing improvements in end-to-end latency and power requirements for user equipment.
Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a key enabling technology for Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks. MEC facilitates distributed cloud computing capabilities and information technology service environment for applications and services at the edges of mobile networks. This architectural modification serves to reduce congestion, latency, and improve the performance of such edge colocated applications and devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how reactive service migration can be orchestrated for low-power MEC-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Here, we use open-source Kubernetes as container orchestration system. Our demo is based on traditional client-server system from user equipment (UE) over Long Term Evolution (LTE) to the MEC server. As the use case scenario, we post-process live video received over web real-time communication (WebRTC). Next, we integrate orchestration by Kubernetes with S1 handovers, demonstrating MEC-based software defined network (SDN). Now, edge applications may reactively follow the UE within the radio access network (RAN), expediting low-latency. The collected data is used to analyze the benefits of the low-power MEC-enabled IoT device scheme, in which end-to-end (E2E) latency and power requirements of the UE are improved. We further discuss the challenges of implementing such schemes and future research directions therein.