Container-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications in an edge computing environment require autoscaling to dynamically adapt to fluctuations in IoT device requests. Although Kubernetes' horizontal pod autoscaler provides the resource autoscaling feature by monitoring the resource status of nodes and then making pod adjustments if necessary, it evenly allocates pods to worker nodes without considering the imbalance of resource demand between nodes in an edge computing environment. This paper proposes the traffic-aware horizontal pod autoscaler (THPA), which operates on top of Kubernetes to enable real-time traffic-aware resource autoscaling for IoT applications in an edge computing environment. THPA performs upscaling and downscaling actions based on network traffic information from nodes to improve the quality of IoT services in the edge computing infrastructure. Experimental results show that Kubernetes with THPA improves the average response time and throughput of IoT applications by approximately 150% compared to Kubernetes with the horizontal pod autoscaler. This indicates that it is important to provide proper resource scaling according to the network traffic distribution to maximize IoT applications performance in an edge computing environment.INDEX TERMS Kubernetes, horizontal pod autoscaler, network-aware resource provisioning, IoT.
KubeEdge (KE) is a container orchestration platform for deploying and managing containerized IoT applications in an edge computing environment based on Kubernetes. It is intended to be hosted at the edge and provides seamless cloud-edge coordination as well as an offline mode that allows the edge to function independently of the cloud. However, there are unreliable communication links between edge nodes in edge computing environments, implying that load balancing in an edge computing environment is not guaranteed while using KE. Furthermore, KE lacks Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA), implying that KE cannot dynamically deploy new resources to efficiently handle increasing requests. Both of the aforementioned issues have a significant impact on the performance of the KE-based edge computing system, particularly when traffic volumes vary over time and geographical location. In this study, a nodebased horizontal pod autoscaler (NHPA) is proposed to provide dynamical adjustment for the number of pods of individual nodes independently from each other in an edge computing environment where the traffic volume fluctuates over time and location, and the communication links between edge nodes are not stable. The proposed NHPA can dynamically adjust the number of pods depending on the incoming traffic at each node, which will improve the overall performance of the KubeEdge-based edge computing environment. In the KubeEdge-based edge computing environment, the experimental findings reveal that NHPA outperforms KE in terms of throughput and response time by a factor of about 3 and 25, respectively.INDEX TERMS Kubernetes, KubeEdge, horizontal pod autoscaler, dynamic resource provisioning, Edge Computing, IoT.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.