Comparison of Linux virtual machines and containers for a service migration in 5G multi-access edge computing

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a novel and efficient technology to enable a new breed of time sensitive applications in the 5G era. By installing small computing infrastructures at the network edges, it solves the current centralized structure problem of the cloud infrastructure (i.e., high end-to-end communication latency between a user equipment and the cloud). As users move across different sites over time, continuous seamless service support to the users is also required. A service migration in 5G MEC is a promising approach for continuous seamless service support by migrating active services to a new MEC host near the current user location. In this paper, a comparison result for the service migration implemented either in a virtual machine or container is presented. The motivation behind this paper is to understand the fundamental performance differences between the virtual machine and container for the service migration in 5G MEC.