Multi-dimensional Autoscaling of Processing Services: A Comparison of Agent-based Methods
This work addresses autoscaling challenges for edge computing environments, which is an incremental improvement over traditional methods.
The paper tackles the problem of autoscaling in edge computing by introducing an agent-based framework that dynamically adjusts hardware resources and service configurations to maximize requirements fulfillment under constraints, showing that all tested agents achieve acceptable SLO performance with varying convergence patterns.
Edge computing breaks with traditional autoscaling due to strict resource constraints, thus, motivating more flexible scaling behaviors using multiple elasticity dimensions. This work introduces an agent-based autoscaling framework that dynamically adjusts both hardware resources and internal service configurations to maximize requirements fulfillment in constrained environments. We compare four types of scaling agents: Active Inference, Deep Q Network, Analysis of Structural Knowledge, and Deep Active Inference, using two real-world processing services running in parallel: YOLOv8 for visual recognition and OpenCV for QR code detection. Results show all agents achieve acceptable SLO performance with varying convergence patterns. While the Deep Q Network benefits from pre-training, the structural analysis converges quickly, and the deep active inference agent combines theoretical foundations with practical scalability advantages. Our findings provide evidence for the viability of multi-dimensional agent-based autoscaling for edge environments and encourage future work in this research direction.