MOSE: A Novel Orchestration Framework for Stateful Microservice Migration at the Edge

TL;DR

This paper introduces MOSE, a new framework for efficient stateful microservice migration at the network edge, significantly reducing downtime and improving user QoE in latency-sensitive scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel orchestration framework that enhances migration performance and addresses network and application KPIs for microservice mobility at the edge.

Findings

Up to 77% reduction in migration downtime.

Effective handling of latency-sensitive microservices.

Outperforms existing approaches in practical use cases.

Abstract

Stateful migration has emerged as the dominant technology to support microservice mobility at the network edge while ensuring a satisfying experience to mobile end users. This work addresses two pivotal challenges, namely, the implementation and the orchestration of the migration process. We first introduce a novel framework that efficiently implements stateful migration and effectively orchestrates the migration process by fulfilling both network and application KPI targets. Through experimental validation using realistic microservices, we then show that our solution (i) greatly improves migration performance, yielding up to 77% decrease of the migration downtime with respect to the state of the art, and (ii) successfully addresses the strict user QoE requirements of critical scenarios featuring latency-sensitive microservices. Further, we consider two practical use cases, featuring, respectively, a UAV autopilot microservice and a multi-object tracking task, and demonstrate how our framework outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches in configuring the migration process and in meeting KPI targets.