One of the main challenges in deploying container service is providing the scalability to satisfy the service performance and avoid resource wastage. To deal with this challenge, Kubernetes provides two kinds of scaling mode: vertical and horizontal. Several existing autoscaling methods make efforts to improve the default autoscalers in Kubernetes; however, most of these works only focus on one scaling mode at the same time, which results in some limitations. Only horizontal scaling may lead to low utilization of containers due to the fixed amount of resources for each instance, especially in the low-request period. In contrast, only vertical scaling may not ensure the quality of service (QoS) requirements in case of bursty workload due to reaching the upper limit. Besides, it is also necessary to provide burst identification for auto-scalers to guarantee service performance. This paper proposes a hybrid autoscaling method with burst awareness for containerized applications. This new approach considers a combination of both vertical and horizontal abilities to satisfy the QoS requirement while optimizing the utilization of containers. Our proposal uses a predictive method based on the machine learning technique to predict the future demand of the application and combines it with a burst identification module, which makes scaling decisions more effective. Experimental results show an enhancement in maintaining the response time below the QoS constraint whereas remaining high utilization of the deployment compared with existing baseline methods in single scaling mode.

Recently, the development of Kubernetes (K8s) containerization platform has enabled cloud-based, lightweight, highly scalable, and agile services in both general and telco use-cases. Ensuring high availability, reliable and continuous containerized services is a major requirement of service providers to provide fault-tolerance, transparent service experiences to end-users. To satisfy this requirement, fault prediction and proactive stateful service recovery features must be applied in cloud systems. Prior proactive failure recovery approaches mostly focused on either improving fault prediction performance based on different machine learning time series forecasting techniques or optimizing recovery service placement after fault prediction. However, a mechanism that enables stateful containerized service migration from the predicted faulty node to the healthy destination node has not been studied. Service migration in previous proactive works is only simulated or performed by virtual machine (VM) migration techniques. In this paper, we propose a proactive stateful fault-tolerant system for K8s containerized services that pipelines a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) fault prediction framework and a novel K8s stateful service migration mechanism for service recovery. Experimental results show how the Bi-LSTM model improved prediction performance against other time-series forecasting models in prior proactive works. We then combined the Bi-LSTM fault prediction framework with both the default K8s and our stateful migration mechanisms. The comparison between these two proactive systems proves our system efficiency in terms of avoiding Quality of Service (QoS) violation.

After a disaster happens, effective communication and information sharing between emergency response team members play a crucial role in a successful disaster response phase. With dedicated roles and missions are assigned to responders, role-based communication is a pivotal feature that an emergency communication network needs to support. Previous works have shown that Named Data Networking (NDN) has many advantages over traditional IP-based networks in providing this feature. However, these studies are only simulation-based. To apply NDN in disaster scenarios, real implementation of a deployment architecture over existing infrastructure during the disaster should be considered. Not only should it ensure efficient emergency communication, but the architecture should deal with other disaster-related challenges such as responder mobility, intermittent network, and replacement possibility due to disaster damage. In this paper, we designed and implemented an NDN-based disaster response support system over Edge Computing infrastructure with KubeEdge as the chosen edge platform to solve the above issues. Our proof-of-concept system performance shows that the architecture achieved efficient role-based communication support, fast mobility handover duration, quick network convergence time in case of node replacement, and loss-free information exchange between responders and the management center on the cloud.

In edge computing, scheduling heterogeneous workloads with diverse resource requirements is challenging. Besides limited resources, the servers may be overwhelmed with computational tasks, resulting in lengthy task queues and congestion occasioned by unusual network traffic patterns. Additionally, Internet of Things (IoT)/Edge applications have different characteristics coupled with performance requirements, which become determinants if most edge applications can both satisfy deadlines and each user’s QoS requirements. This study aims to address these restrictions by proposing a mechanism that improves the cluster resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS) in an edge cloud cluster in terms of service time. Containerization can provide a way to improve the performance of the IoT-Edge cloud by factoring in task dependencies and heterogeneous application resource demands. In this paper, we propose STaSA, a service time aware scheduler for the edge environment. The algorithm automatically assigns requests onto different processing nodes and then schedules their execution under real-time constraints, thus minimizing the number of QoS violations. The effectiveness of our scheduling model is demonstrated through implementation on KubeEdge, a container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. Experimental results show significantly fewer violations in QoS during scheduling and improved performance compared to the state of the art.

One of the critical targets of the fifth generation (5G) mobile network is supporting low latency and high reliable services at the network edge servers. Multiple service instances of the same service can be deployed on different geographically distributed edge sites for high availability purposes. However, the dynamic changes over time in edge servers’ computing capabilities and underlay infrastructure network quality might affect service performance. To avoid service performance degradation, an efficient computing-aware traffic steering (CATS) solution between different service instance locations is required. Multiple advanced traffic steering algorithms have been proposed in different existing 5G traffic steering works. However, no available works addressed the possible 5G architecture and procedure changes to convert these CATS algorithms’ decisions into 5G mobile user plane routing paths. This work aims to cover this research gap. We propose enhancing the current 5G architecture by applying the Mobile User Plane Controller (MUP-C) concept and using anycast address for multi-instance services. We discuss three implementation options to apply these enhancement features to 5G architecture: CATS Application Function (AF) traffic influence method, CATS MUP-C dummy User Plane Function (UPF) method, and CATS MUP-C non-UPF method. We implemented and evaluated the performance of our solutions against a 3GPP standard dynamic edge discovery method, which can also be used to support CATS. The results showed that our solutions had better Protocol Data Unit (PDU) session setup procedure efficiency for CATS than the standard method by reducing the setup latency from 30% to 50%.