Performance Analysis of Memory Cloning Solutions in Mobile Edge Computing

This paper deals with the problem of service migration in the emerging scenarios of Mobile Edge Computing. Mobile edge computing is achieved by moving the traditional cloud infrastructures, exploited by many today applications, close to the network edge in order to reduce the response times in the so called tactile-internet. However, because of user mobility, such an application architecture may pose the problem of service migration in case of handover from one server site to another. After introducing the current solutions for dealing with service migration and, in particular, the approaches based on service decomposition into multiple layers, we quantify the migration time and the service downtime achieved under different policies (pre-copy, post-copy and hybrid-copy) for stopping and synchronizing the application between source and destination server. Numerical results are provided for RAM-intensive applications, for which a pre-copy approach can be particularly interesting.