Proximity-Aware Traffic Routing in Distributed Fog Computing Platforms

Container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes do not take into account the geographical location of application replicas when deciding which replica should handle which request. This makes them ill-suited to act as a general-purpose fog computing platforms where the proximity between end users and the replica serving them is essential. We present proxy-mity, a proximity-aware traffic routing system for distributed fog computing platforms. It seamlessly integrates in Kubernetes, and provides very simple control mechanisms to allow system administrators to address the necessary trade-off between reducing the user-to-replica latencies and balancing the load equally across replicas. proxy-mity is very lightweight and it can reduce average user-to-replica latencies by as much as 90% while allowing the system administrators to control the level of load imbalance in their system.