Container Image Similarity-Aware Resource Provisioning for Serverless Edge Computing
Ao Zhou, Sisi Li, Xiao Ma, Yiran Zhang, Shangguang Wang · 2023
Container-enabled serverless computing has become a widely adopted approach for resource provisioning in the edge cloud. However, traffic incurred by container image pulling heavily burdens the already congested back-haul network. To relieve the problem, we do an analysis on Docker Hub, and find that instance deployment strategy has a significant impact on the back-haul traffic due to the varying similarity levels of different images. We incorporate this feature into task offloading decision and resource provisioning, and formulate the problem with a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem. To address the challenges arising from the coupling and contradiction of instance deployment, image pulling, offloading decision, and resource allocation, we employ multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to decompose the problem into several simpler sub-problems, and design an algorithm for each sub-problem individually by exploiting convex optimization and fractional programming techniques. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experiment results illustrate that our algorithm outperforms current notable solutions and improves the global utility by 13%–74%.