Performance Evaluation of Secured Containerization for Edge Computing in 5G Communication Network

Abstract

Portable mobile devices capabilities are bedevilled by shortfall in computational memory, storage, networking and energy carrying capacity. These issues of resource poverty have been challenges the telecommunication industry had to cope with in portable mobile devices. Earlier research efforts like Cloudlets, Cyber Foraging, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), and recently, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) have been proffered. Container workflow orchestration provides automation capabilities for MEC to deliver just in time applications and services. This enables service providers to give ubiquitous access to specified applications or services since applications infrastructures are pushed to repositories and can be deployed by downloading from a repository. Containers are more easily orchestrated unlike virtual machines (VM) or bare metal, this provides the required DevOps ecosystem for developers and engineers to work across the entire application lifecycle. This streamlines the process of automating application setup by establishing standard procedures for rapid deployments while also reducing human error associated with manual setups. In this paper, secured containerization techniques were employed in order to achieve end-to-end low latency figures for MEC infrastructure isolation as required by the European Technology Standard Institute (ETSI) for MEC application security. An evaluation was done by comparing secured containerized app deployment in the cloud and edge scenarios. The result obtained validated that edge computing has lower User Plane (UP) latency figures, less backhaul traffic and a lower application failure rate.