Dynamic Microservice Provisioning in 5G Networks Using Edge–Cloud Continuum

With the advent of 5G and beyond, the mobile network operator is integrated with edge computing capabilities along with the cloud. This paradigm requires the application at UE to consist of multiple microservices that are appropriately placed at the edge/cloud with dynamic relocation to enhance the overall Quality of Service (QoS) of the application. In this work, a Microservice-Scheduler is developed to dynamically relocate an application’s microservices between the edge and cloud server. The relocation decision is based on the CPU utilization of the edge server. The developed Microservice-Scheduler is integrated in ETSI compliant 5G testbed. The deployment is evaluated by analyzing the different scenarios obtained while monitoring the completion time of the microservices. It is observed that in the majority of scenarios, relocating microservices between the edge and cloud server outperforms the edge-only and cloud-only approaches. In addition, the dynamic relocation mechanism aids in better utilization of the resources while enhancing the overall QoS of the application’s microservices.