Abstract
The sixth generation (6G) of communication networks represents more of a revolution than an evolution of the previous generations, providing new directions and innovative approaches to face the network challenges of the future. A crucial aspect is to make the best use of available resources for the support of an entirely new generation of services. From this viewpoint, the Web of Things (WoT), which enables Things to become Web Things to chain, use and re-use in IoT mashups, allows interoperability among IoT platforms. At the same time, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) brings computing and data storage to the edge of the network, which creates the so-called distributed and collective edge intelligence. Such intelligence is created in order to deal with the huge amount of data to be collected, analyzed and processed, from real word contexts, such as smart cities, which are evolving into dynamic and networked systems of people and things. To better exploit this architecture, it is crucial to break monolithic applications into modular microservices, which can be executed independently. Here, we propose an approach based on complex network theory and two weighted and interdependent multiplex networks to address the Microservices-compliant Load Balancing (McLB) problem in MEC infrastructure. Our findings show that the multiplex network representation represents an extra dimension of analysis, allowing to capture the complexity in WoT mashup organization and its impact on the organizational aspect of MEC servers. The impact of this extracted knowledge on the cognitive organization of MEC is quantified, through the use of heuristics that are engineered to guarantee load balancing and, consequently, QoS.
Highlights
The forthcoming 6G will attempt to rewrite the communication networks’ perspective, focusing on a paradigm shift in the way technologies and services are conceived, integrated and used
A finding from such a cartography is that greater values of complex involvementM2 can be noticed in nodes classified as regular multiplex, confirming that the multiplex network representation is quite suitable to capture the complexity of the considered scenario, where computation is shifted to the edge
These nodes are regular because they have a low number of incident edges and multiplex as their links are well distributed across the layers
Summary
The forthcoming 6G will attempt to rewrite the communication networks’ perspective, focusing on a paradigm shift in the way technologies and services are conceived, integrated and used. The Microservices-compliant Load Balancing (McLB) problem in MEC infrastructures is addressed, and a solution is proposed that joins complex network theory with multiplex dimension representation and analysis of these networks. This approach represents a change of perspective that allows multiplexity to capture the complexity of WoT mashup organizations, both in terms of their internal interdependencies and their impact on the cognitive organizational aspect of MEC devices/servers [15,16].
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