Experimental evaluation of LXC container migration for cloudlets using multipath TCP
Abstract Mobile devices have been widely used in practice. As a result, the concept of Cloudlet – a “small data center” close to users at the edge – has been proposed to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) of end users if the contents could be retrieved from a geographically nearby Cloudlet servers. Moreover, containers also have received growing attention in practice due to their lightweight feature. This paper adopts LXC containers that are used as Cloudlet platforms and uses CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore in the userspace) for container migration between Cloudlets. On the other hand, network traffic may go through the Internet, which may experience network congestion or failures when container migration occurs. Hence, this paper adopts the Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol with an aim to improve QoS/QoE, because MPTCP establishes multiple subflows for a connection, which can reduce migration delay and increase the resilience of the migration process. We have integrated LXC and MPTCP for container migration in a Cloudlet environment to experimentally validate the proposed approach via various experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can increase the performance and reliability of the migration process compared with that of using virtual machines (VMs).