Efficient Data Delivery Scheme for Large-Scale Microservices in Distributed Cloud Environment

The edge computing paradigm has emerged as a new scope within the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT) by bringing cloud services to the network edge in order to construct distributed architectures. To efficiently deploy latency-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry IoT application services, edge computing paradigms make use of devices on the network periphery that are distributed and resource-constrained. On the other hand, microservice architectures are becoming increasingly popular for developing IoT applications owing to their maintainability and scalability advantages. Providing an efficient communication medium for large-scale microservice-based IoT applications constructed from small and independent services to cooperate to deliver value-added services remains a challenge. This paper introduces an event-driven communication medium that takes advantage of Edge-Cloud publish/subscribe brokers for microservice-based IoT applications at scale. Using the interaction model, the involved microservices can collaborate and exchange data through triggered events flexibly and efficiently without changing their underlying business logic. In the proposed model, edge brokers are grouped according to their similarities in event channels and the proximity of their geolocations, reducing the data delivery latency. Moreover, in the proposed system a technique is designed to construct a broker-based utility matrix with constraints in order to strike a balance between delay, relay traffic, and scalability while arranging brokers into proper clusters for efficient data delivery. Rigorous simulation results prove that the proposed publish/subscribe model can provide an efficient interaction medium for microservice-based IoT applications to collaborate and exchange data with low latency, modest relay traffic, and high scalability at scale.