Distributed Edge Cloud Availability

Abstract: With 5G being rolled out across the world, new performance-sensitive applications are emerging in various domains. To meet their performance goals, such as availability, latency, etc., a new distributed edge cloud will be set up near the logical edge of the telecom operator's network. However, lower availability inside the distributed edge cloud could cost significant economic losses to the cloud provider. The application's availability requirements may be expressed in terms of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Therefore, the availability information could be exposed to an application orchestrator to ensure the applications' SLA is met. Some early works have addressed the availability inside data centers, however, none of the existing works considers the availability over a distributed edge cloud system. To cover this gap, this thesis work proposes a methodology to assess edge cloud availability. The methodology contains a system model of distributed edge clouds to solve the availability estimation problem. Some availability metrics are also defined from the perspective of both edge cloud operators and application developers. Moreover, a simulation framework is extended to evaluate this methodology. This thesis also studies the sensitivity analysis of availability due to various parameters. The sensitivity results show that overload delay is a factor that affects system availability, along with node and link failures. Furthermore, the results show that node failure is a more dominant factor that affects system availability, instead of link failure. The thesis also makes recommendations for further research work.