One Paper Has Been Accepted to IEEE ICCCN 2019 -
On the Importance of container images placement for service provisioning in the Edge
Jad Darrous, Thomas Lambert, and Shadi Ibrahim
Edge computing promises to extend clouds by moving computation close to data sources to facilitate short running and low latency applications and services. Providing fast and predictable service provisioning time presets a new and mounting challenge, as the scale of Edge-servers grows and the heterogeneity of network between them increases. This paper is driven by a simple question: can we place container images across Edge-servers in such a way that an image can be retrieved to any Edge-server fast and in a predictable time. To this end, we present KCBP and KCBP-WC, two container image placement algorithms which aim to reduce the maximum retrieval time of container images. KCBP and KCBP-WC are based on k- Center optimization. However, KCBP-WC tries to avoid placing large layers of a container image on the same Edge-server. Our evaluations from trace-driven simulation show that KCBP and KCBP-WC can be applied to various network configurations and reduce the maximum retrieval time of container images by 1.1x to 4x compared to state-of-the-art placements (i.e., Best-Fit and Random).