Context-Aware Kubernetes Scheduler for Edge-native Applications on 5G

Abstract

This paper is an extension of work originally presented in SoftCOM 2019 [1]. The novelty of this work reside in its focused improvement of our scheduling algorithm towards its usage on a real 5G infrastructure. Industrial IoT applications are often designed to run in a distributed way on the devices and controller computers with strict service requirements for the nodes and the links between them. 5G, especially in concomitance with Edge Computing, will provide the desired level of connectivity for these setups and it will permit to host application run-time components in edge clouds. However, allocation of the edge cloud resources for Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications, is still commonly solved by rudimentary scheduling techniques (i.e. simple strategies based on CPU usage and device readiness, employing very few dynamic information). Orchestrators inherited from the cloud computing, like Kubernetes, are not satisfying to the requirements of the aforementioned applications and are not optimized for the diversity of devices which are often also limited in capacity. This design is especially slow in reacting to the environmental changes. In such circumstances, in order to provide a proper solution using these tools, we propose to take the physical, operational and network parameters (thus the full context of the IIoT application) into consideration, along with the software states and orchestrate the applications dynamically.