Service Routing in Multi-Tier Edge Computing: A Matching Game Approach

Abstract

Although microservice envisioned as a promising approach for edge applications which can improves the development efficiency and the deployment productivity, it also leads to the operational complexity during service runtime. This leads to the emergence of service mesh, a decided infrastructure layer over microservices for reliable service-to-service communication. However, when migrating the service mesh to the multi-tier edge computing, the corresponding extensions on the top of service mesh is needed to overcome the challenges brought by the multi-tier edge servers, shared microservices and diverse QoS requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problem of service routing to achieve the efficient microservice-based service provision in multi-tier edge computing. The objective is to route user requests to the optimal microservice instances with low service delay and resource cost. To this end, we first formulate the service routing problem as an integer non-linear optimization problem, which is NP-hard. Then we map it to a many-to-one matching problem by employing the matching game theory and propose a dependency-aware deferred acceptance algorithm with dynamic quota. The experimental results based on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly outperform existing representative algorithms in terms of service delay and resource cost.