Evaluating and Improving LXC Container Migration Between Cloudlets Using Multipath TCP

The advent of the Cloudlet concept—a “small data center” close to users at the edge is to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) of end users by providing resources within a one-hop distance. Many researchers have proposed using virtual machines (VMs) as such service-provisioning servers. However, seeing the potentiality of containers, this thesis adopts Linux Containers (LXC) as Cloudlet platforms. To facilitate container migration between Cloudlets, Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace (CRIU) has been chosen as the migration tool. Since the migration process goes through the Wide Area Network (WAN), which may experience network failures, the Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol is adopted to address the challenge. The multiple subflows established within a MPTCP connection can improve the resilience of the migration process and reduce migration time. Experimental results show that LXC containers are suitable candidates for the problem and MPTCP protocol is effective in enhancing the migration process.