Fast Service Migration Method Based on Virtual Machine Technology for MEC

Abstract

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile edge computing (MEC) has become an effective solution to meet the energy efficiency and delay requirements of IoT applications. In MEC systems, tasks can be offloaded from lightweight mobile devices to edge nodes that are nearer to the users. To improve user experience, we combine remote loading and redirection to accelerate the service migration. By tracing historic access patterns, the proposed method first generates a loading request list that locates the core codes in the image file of service applications for booting. The core codes are then be prefetched and cached automatically. Furthermore, to avoid the potential UI lagging caused by incomplete service migration, edge nodes can continuously load the remaining codes in the image file. Once the image file is completely migrated, the file will be reconstructed. The running virtual machine (VM) then switches data access to the merged image file. Experiments show that this method can observably reduce the loading time of a VM-based application.