DMSA: A Decentralized Microservice Architecture for Edge Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces DMSA, a decentralized microservice architecture tailored for edge networks, enhancing scheduling, discovery, and monitoring to improve performance and reliability in complex, dynamic environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel decentralized architecture with customized scheduling, monitoring, and discovery modules specifically designed for edge networks, outperforming traditional centralized approaches.

Findings

Improves service response delay by 60-75%.

Increases execution success rate by 10-15%.

Effectively counters link failures and network fluctuations.

Abstract

The dispersed node locations and complex topologies of edge networks, combined with intricate dynamic microservice dependencies, render traditional centralized microservice architectures (MSAs) unsuitable. In this paper, we propose a decentralized microservice architecture (DMSA), which delegates scheduling functions from the control plane to edge nodes. DMSA redesigns and implements three core modules of microservice discovery, monitoring, and scheduling for edge networks to achieve precise awareness of instance deployments, low monitoring overhead and measurement errors, and accurate dynamic scheduling, respectively. Particularly, DMSA has customized a microservice scheduling scheme that leverages multi-port listening and zero-copy forwarding to guarantee high data forwarding efficiency. Moreover, a dynamic weighted multi-level load balancing algorithm is proposed to adjust scheduling dynamically with consideration of reliability, priority, and response delay. Finally, we have implemented a physical verification platform for DMSA. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art and traditional scheduling schemes, DMSA effectively counteracts link failures and network fluctuations, improving the service response delay and execution success rate by approximately $60\% \sim 75\%$ and $10\%\sim15\%$, respectively.