Dynamic Migration of Microservices for End-to-End Latency Control in 5G/6G Networks

With the adoption of the microservice paradigm by the telecom industry in the design of 5G/6G networks, complex network functions are decomposed into sets of chained sub-functions, which are further deployed using containerized technologies over geographically distributed cloud clusters. Latency-sensitive applications require to carefully orchestrate the allocation and re-arrangement of (micro)services to prevent from a largely segmented placement of microservices. To address this issue in the context of network functions, we introduce a novel placement and migration strategy that chooses those specific microservice(s) to migrate and the optimal destination (data center) while considering the impact of the migration on other microservices. We devise fast and effective heuristics that are extensively studied via simulation experiments, that show that our proposed approach significantly reduces the service latency.