Enhancing Pre-Copy Strategy for Efficient Containerized Stateful Service Migration in MEC

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) holds a promising paradigm shift, facilitating the migration of cloud resources from the network core to the network edge to bolster the support for high-quality time-sensitive applications. However, due to the dynamic and resource-constrained nature of MEC systems, there is a desirability for exploring service migration issues. In this paper, we investigate the pre-copy-based migration of stateful containerized services, emphasizing the diverse user requirements and the unique characteristics of containers. Traditional pre-copy schemes often rely on fixed downtime thresholds or predefined iteration rounds to terminate the iterative copying process, which could potentially lead to a slow migration process and ultimately diminish migration efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic model formulation for the service migration problem tailored to accommodate various user requirements, and devise an enhanced pre-copy migration strategy based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) named PSO-PCM. Moreover, for seamless migration of services, the container’s Union File System (UFS) is also considered in this paper. Simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme outperforms the baseline schemes, significantly reducing total migration time and enhancing migration efficiency.