Containers vs Virtual Machines: Choosing the Right Virtualization Technology for Mobile Edge Cloud

Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) is paving the way for 5G networks in respective of latency and computation offloading. To support user mobility, MEC service should be migrated from one base station to another to remain in close proximity to users. Providing low migration time and downtime is one of the critical challenges in MEC. Prior studies mainly focused on the service migration in data centers where only the downtime is taken into account. Meanwhile, the total migration time in MEC significantly influences the service latency due to the user's mobility. In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement study on service migration in MEC. The evaluation results, which are conducted on commercial edge servers, show the infeasibility of the investigated migration approaches. Specifically, they introduce high migration time and subsequently result in service degradation for latency-sensitive applications in MEC.