A Highly-Available Multiple Region Multi-access Edge Computing Platform with Traffic Failover

Abstract: One of the main challenges in the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) issteering traffic from clients to the nearest MEC instances. If the nearest MECfails, a failover mechanism should provide mitigation by steering the trafficto the next nearest MEC. There are two conventional approaches to solve thisproblem, i.e., GeoDNS and Internet Protocol (IP) anycast. GeoDNS is notfailover friendly because of the Domain Name System (DNS) cache lifetime.Moreover, the use of a recursive resolver may inaccurately translate the IPaddress to its geolocation. Thus, this thesis studies and proposes a highlyavailable MEC platform leveraging IP anycast. We built a proof-of-conceptusing Kubernetes, MetalLB, and a custom health-checker running on theGNS3 network emulator. We measured latency, failure percentage, and MeanTime To Repair (MTTR) to observe the system’s behavior. The performanceevaluation of the proposed solution shows an average recovery time betterthan one second. The number of failed requests and latency overhead growslinearly as the failover time and latency between two MECs increases. Thisthesis demonstrates the effectiveness of IP anycast for MEC applications tosteer the traffic to the nearest MEC instance and to enhance resiliency withminor overhead.