A Survey on Mobility-Induced Service Migration in the Fog, Edge, and Related Computing Paradigms

Abstract

With the advent of fog and edge computing paradigms, computation capabilities have been moved toward the edge of the network to support the requirements of highly demanding services. To ensure that the quality of such services is still met in the event of users’ mobility, migrating services across different computing nodes becomes essential. Several studies have emerged recently to address service migration in different edge-centric research areas, including fog computing, multi-access edge computing (MEC), cloudlets, and vehicular clouds. Since existing surveys in this area focus on either VM migration in general or migration in a single research field (e.g., MEC), the objective of this survey is to bring together studies from different, yet related, edge-centric research fields while capturing the different facets they addressed. More specifically, we examine the diversity characterizing the landscape of migration scenarios at the edge, present an objective-driven taxonomy of the literature, and highlight contributions that rather focused on architectural design and implementation. Finally, we identify a list of gaps and research opportunities based on the observation of the current state of the literature. One such opportunity lies in joining efforts from both networking and computing research communities to facilitate future research in this area.

Latency-aware Resource Management at the Edge

“…Rejiba et al [61] focus on one specific aspect of resource management and survey works dealing with service migration. Their classification is based on the type of objective chosen for the optimization of the migration performance: either it is about cost, time or success rate.…”

Reducing Service Migrations in Fog Infrastructures by Optimizing Node Location

“…A great amount of state-of-the art literature on mobility induced service migrations is covered by the recent study [11]. The authors present recent advances where service migration has been studied on divers paradigms as cloudlets, Fog computing, cloud-based vehicular networks and multi-access edge computing.…”

“…First, we have a migration cost which is incurred when the service is moved from the previously serving node to the one serving the new user location [7,11,14]. Factors that affect the migration cost are the service size, the cost to initiate and release a service and the bandwidth consumed to migrate the service.…”

RELIABLE: Resource Allocation Mechanism for 5G Network using Mobile Edge Computing

“…Furthermore, user mobility leads to service reallocation inside MEC to maintain service provision. Thus, user mobility highly impacts the service allocation/reallocation performance in terms of service delivery [ 21 ]. This is because the service may not be served due to a lack of resources, the service may be blocked in the search for a device to be allocated or reallocated, or it may have its quality of service impaired due to the need to relocate the service.…”