Characterizing Docker Overhead in Mobile Edge Computing Scenarios

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging network paradigm that provides cloud and IT services at the point of access of the network. Such proximity to the end user translates into ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, while, at the same time, it alleviates traffic congestion in the network core. Due to the need to run servers on edge nodes (e.g., an LTE-A macro eNodeB), a key element of MEC architectures is to ensure server portability and low overhead. A possible tool that can be used for this purpose is Docker, a framework that allows easy, fast deployment of Linux containers. This paper addresses the suitability of Docker in MEC scenarios by quantifying the CPU consumed by Docker when running two different containerized services: multiplayer gaming and video streaming. Our tests, run with varying numbers of clients and servers, yield different results for the two case studies: for the gaming service, the overhead logged by Docker increases only with the number of servers; conversely, for the video streaming case, the overhead is not affected by the number of either clients or servers.