Energy-aware Distributed Microservice Request Placement at the Edge

TL;DR

This paper explores decentralized microservice request placement at the edge, formulating it as a traveling purchaser problem to minimize energy use while meeting latency constraints, and compares different energy metrics.

Contribution

It introduces an integer linear programming approach for energy-aware request placement in edge microservices, considering multiple energy metrics and their impact.

Findings

Energy metrics influence placement decisions.

Different energy metrics lead to varied energy reduction strategies.

Decentralized request placement can be optimized for energy efficiency.

Abstract

Microservice is a way of splitting the logic of an application into small blocks that can be run on different computing units and used by other applications. It has been successful for cloud applications and is now increasingly used for edge applications. This new architecture brings many benefits but it makes deciding where a given service request should be executed (i.e. its placement) more complex as every small block needed for the request has to be placed. In this paper, we investigate decentralized request placement (DRP) for services using the microservice architecture. We consider the DRP problem as an instance of a traveling purchaser problem and propose an integer linear programming formulation. This formulation aims at minimizing energy consumption while respecting latency requirements. We consider two different energy consumption metrics, namely overall or marginal energy, to study how optimizing towards these impacts the request placement decision. Our simulations show that the request placement decision can indeed be influenced by the energy metric chosen, leading to different energy reduction strategies.