Seamless Cross-Edge Service Migration for Real-Time Rendering Applications

• Published in: IEEE transactions on mobile computing 2024-06, Vol.23 (6), p.7084-7098
• Main Authors: Li, Yuanzhe, Wang, Shangguang, Li, Yuanchun, Zhou, Ao, Xu, Mengwei, Ma, Xiao, Liu, Yunxin
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: 5G core network; Cloud computing; Containers; downtime; Freezing; mobile edge computing; Real time; Real-time systems; Rendering; Rendering (computer graphics); service migration; Streaming media; Streams; Switches; Switching; User experience; Virtual environments
• ISSN: 1536-1233; 1558-0660
• DOI: 10.1109/TMC.2023.3331773

Seamless cross-edge migration for real-time rendering applications is challenging. The strong interactive nature of real-time rendering applications demands a downtime lower than \text{15}\;\text{ms} 15ms to achieve an imperceptible migration. Existing methods based on virtual machine migration and container migration suffer from unpleasant downtime brought by dirty page retransmission-induced repeated memory data copy and the shared storage failure-induced extensive disk data copy. In this article, we propose Cloud-assisted Service Migration (CSM) which leverages cloud-edge collaboration to achieve seamless service migration for real-time rendering applications. CSM improves service migration user experience in three folds: First, it introduces a dual rendering mechanism to bypass the peer-to-peer data copy and compresses the freezing stage. Second, a user equipment-centric session switch mechanism is proposed to save time by well coordinating application session switches and 5G user plane session switches. Third, a smooth switching mechanism is leveraged to prevent unpleasant frame flickers during session switching. We implement CSM in edge-rendering multiplayer games and deploy it on a 5G test bed with a full-stack user plane protocol stack. The evaluation results show that CSM can reduce downtime to < \text{14}\;\text{ms}