Enabling Proactive Microservice Placement in Collaborative Edge Computing Networks

Service placement is a critical problem in mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure seamless service provision. Recently, some proactive service placement schemes have been proposed. However, most of these designs focus on the placement of independent services, which cannot efficiently handle directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based services. Existing DAG-based service placement schemes fail to consider the collaboration of the edge server for placing microservices. Moreover, they do not consider the impact of microservice placement orders on service latency. In this paper, we propose a proactive microservice placement framework in collaborative edge computing, aiming to minimize the overall service latency. To improve the microservice placement rate on a single edge server, we first design a microservice sorting scheme and then develop a dynamic microservice placement algorithm, employing the concept of the sliding window. After that, we extend the design and propose a critical path-based collaborative microservice placement algorithm. This algorithm supports collaboration across edge servers and reduces the need for forwarding requests to the remote cloud. Finally, we analyze the theoretical results and time complexity of the proposed algorithms. The experiment results indicate that our proposed algorithm can reduce DAG service response latency by 2.28–30.45%.