Characterizing Docker Overhead in Mobile Edge Computing Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Docker's CPU overhead in Mobile Edge Computing scenarios by analyzing its impact on two services, multiplayer gaming and video streaming, under various client and server configurations.

Contribution

It provides empirical measurements of Docker overhead in MEC, highlighting how it varies with different services and system configurations, informing deployment decisions.

Findings

Docker overhead increases with the number of servers for gaming.

Docker overhead remains unaffected by client or server count for video streaming.

Results help optimize container deployment in MEC environments.

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging network paradigm that provides cloud and IT services at the point of access of the network. Such proximity to the end user translates into ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, while, at the same time, it alleviates traffic congestion in the network core. Due to the need to run servers on edge nodes (e.g., an LTE-A macro eNodeB), a key element of MEC architectures is to ensure server portability and low overhead. A possible tool that can be used for this purpose is Docker, a framework that allows easy, fast deployment of Linux containers. This paper addresses the suitability of Docker in MEC scenar- ios by quantifying the CPU consumed by Docker when running two different containerized services: multiplayer gam- ing and video streaming. Our tests, run with varying numbers of clients and servers, yield different results for the two case studies: for the gaming service, the overhead logged by Docker increases only with the number of servers; con- versely, for the video streaming case, the overhead is not affected by the number of either clients or servers.