Data-Transfer-Aware Microservice Deployment for Edge Computing

As the microservice architecture becomes widely adopted in industry and attracts increasing attention from academia, research on deploying microservices in edge-computing environments has made substantial progress. Nevertheless, most existing studies aim to reduce overall response time primarily by optimizing deployment strategies to shorten request-processing time, often overlooking the importance of communication time. In this paper, we formulate the microservice deployment problem as the Communication Time Minimization Problem (CTMP) and propose the Volume-Aware Microservice Deployment (VAMD) algorithm, which places microservices based on the data-transfer volume between them. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The results show that, compared with two baseline algorithms, VAMD significantly reduces inter-microservice communication time.