Enabling Application Relocation in ETSI MEC: A Container-Migration Approach

ETSI MEC is a standard for edge computing which allows the execution of services - called MEC applications - on hosts in user proximity. One of the emerging concepts within ETSI MEC is that of MEC application relocation, i.e., the migration of a MEC application between edge hosts. ETSI MEC identifies several approaches to relocate a MEC application along with its internal state. However, some of these approaches devote the transfer of the application state to the application itself, whereas others rely on costly virtual-machine migration procedures. To overcome the above limitations, in this work we extend ETSI MEC to support MEC application relocation by exploiting container-migration technologies. We evaluate the performance of our implementation over a small-scale edge testbed, showing the overall benefits of the proposed approach.