Enabling service mobility in edge computing by means of Edge Proxies and HTTP Alternative Services

Edge computing is a distributed-computing model that provides services instantiated next to end users. This approach ensures reduced latency and bandwidth usage with respect to cloud solutions, that is particularly important for real time applications having very low latency requirements such as image and sensor processing in autonomous vehicles or cloud gaming. Regardless of the application, the common requirement is the dynamic relocation of the service as close (in terms of latency) to the moving client as possible, possibly in a way that that is completely transparent to it. The proposed solution makes use of HTTP Alternative-Services, an extension of HTTP standardized by IETF in 2016 (RFC 7838) to inform HTTP client that the same service is available also on some other host. In particular, on every edge node, an instance of Envoy acts as reverse proxy to allow end users to access their own computing resources. In this way, end user has a single connection to Envoy to access all services they need. All the platform is orchestrated by an Orchestrator Java application, that is responsible for handling login, logout, and migration of the end users and setup the platform accordingly. Performance evaluation tests show that the solution is significantly better in terms of average response time than DNS or no migration alternatives