Proximity-Aware Traffic Routing in Distributed Fog Computing Platforms
Ali J. Fahs, Guillaume Pierre · 2019
Container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes do not take into account the geographical location of application replicas when deciding which replica should handle which request. This makes them ill-suited to act as a general-purpose fog computing platforms where the proximity between end users and the replica serving them is essential. We present proxy-mity, a proximity-aware traffic routing system for distributed fog computing platforms. It seamlessly integrates in Kubernetes, and provides very simple control mechanisms to allow system administrators to address the necessary trade-off between reducing the user-to-replica latencies and balancing the load equally across replicas. proxy-mity is very lightweight and it can reduce average user-to-replica latencies by as much as 90% while allowing the system administrators to control the level of load imbalance in their system.