CEC: A Containerized Edge Computing Framework for Dynamic Resource Provisioning

Container has been widely used in application development and management systems. However, there are two major challenges faced in the real deployment at edge servers. The varying workload of service requests and the startup delay of containers force a flexible resource provisioning scheme in containerized edge computing. To this end, we propose CEC, a containerized edge computing framework for dynamic resource provisioning, and especially for the smart connected community where exists multiple intelligent applications. CEC integrates workload prediction and resource pre-provisioning to enable low latency of user service requests and high utilization of edge resources. First, we present an online periodic request prediction algorithm. Then, we designed a control-based resource pre-provisioning algorithm based on the predicted request distribution, which is a self-adaptive controller to tune the resource for containers. We evaluate the performance of CEC by simulation and system experiments. The simulation experiment shows that the prediction accuracy of the proposed algorithm is higher than other two prediction algorithms. The testbed experiments demonstrate that the control-based resource pre-provisioning algorithm has low service latency and high resource utilization compared with baselines.

Automated summary

This article introduces two major challenges faced in the real deployment of containers at edge servers: the varying workload of service requests and the startup delay of containers. To address these challenges, a containerized edge computing framework called CEC is proposed, which focuses on the smart connected community with multiple intelligent applications. CEC integrates workload prediction and resource pre-provisioning to achieve low latency and high utilization of edge resources for user service requests.