A Decentralized Framework with Dynamic and Event-Driven Container Orchestration at the Edge

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized, event-driven container orchestration framework at the edge, utilizing blockchain, IPFS, Docker, and MQTT to dynamically manage heterogeneous edge resources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized edge orchestration framework combining blockchain, IPFS, Docker, and MQTT for dynamic resource management and workload distribution.

Findings

Effective resource optimization on edge devices.

Supports heterogeneous workloads in a decentralized manner.

Demonstrates scalability and flexibility of the framework.

Abstract

Virtualization provides an abstraction layer for the Internet of Things technology to tackle the heterogeneity of the edge networks. It enables the deployment of an application on devices with different architectures to achieve uniformity. This study lays down the fundamentals of a framework for dynamic and event-driven orchestration towards a fully decentralized edge. It provides a blockchain-based delivery platform for containerized applications registered with their resource requirements through a registry on a distributed file system, namely InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The decentralized resource manager running on the metrics scraped from the host and the virtualization platform, i.e., Docker in our implementation, dynamically optimizes the resources allocated to each container. The framework ensures that variable workloads of a heterogeneous environment can co-exist on multiple edge devices. An event-driven architecture is built over a lightweight messaging protocol, MQTT, capitalizing on the asynchronous and distributed nature of the publish/subscribe pattern to achieve a truly distributed system.