On the Efficiency of Service and Data Handoff Protocols in Edge Computing Systems

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) enables a new layer of edge middleboxes, acting as local proxies with virtualized resources deployed at edge localities. To support scalable, low-latency, and locally managed service provisioning, MEC relies on computation offloading, the process that outsources computing tasks from resourced constrained mobile devices and moves it to edge data centers. In this paper, we tackle a specific sub-problem within the umbrella of computation offloading. We argue that it is convenient to migrate a service because of the lack of computing resources in the anchor edge data center even if a device, such as industrial IoT devices, is not moving. In this paper, we extensively evaluate the efficiency of data and service handoff protocols. Specifically, we thoroughly assess protocols, that we designed in our past work, in a well-known edge computing emulator, i.e., openLEON. These protocols migrate data and service either in a reactive fashion, i.e., upon realizing of resource exhaustion, or proactively, i.e., beforehand to swiftly minimize the downtime. We experimentally verify their performance for a typical MEC use case, i.e., video. Our results show that by being proactive, the service interruption downtime reduces by a factor of 4 times.