Intelligent Autoscaling of Microservice and Request Routing for Dynamic Service Requests
Pan Lai, Yang Chen, Shisheng Lin, Tongxin Liao, Yi Hu, Menglan Hu, Xiao Zhang, Yuan-ai Xie, Jun Qin · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Microservice architecture provides innovative solutions for delay-sensitive applications and is widely used in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Deploying microservices and implementing request routing within large-scale networks are confronted with numerous challenges, primarily due to intricate dependencies between microservices, frequent data communications between microservices, and the dynamic fluctuations of user request traffic. Given that the user requests are time-varying, the orchestration scheme must enable automatic scaling of microservice instances to ensure service quality. Yet, existing research mainly focuses on static microservice instance deployment, inadequately achieving the intelligent autoscaling of microservices and addressing the time-varying nature of user requests. To address these challenges in dynamic MEC networks, this paper introduces a joint optimization strategy for microservice autoscaling and routing, which adapts to the dynamic fluctuations of user request traffic. Initially, we utilize open Jackson queuing network theory to construct the model, analyzing service request queuing, communication, and processing delays along routing paths, and formulate the problem aiming to minimize deployment costs while ensuring service processing delays are not beyond the delay range that the users can accept. To address the problem, we propose a multi-stage, fine-grained dynamic scaling and routing algorithm. Extensive simulation results indicate that our approach substantially reduces network costs while maintaining network delays within a reasonable range, compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.