Edge Cloud Selection: The Essential Step for Network Service Marketplaces

The evolution of 5G network service ecosystems raises the need for the discovery of services among multiple (edge) clouds with potentially heterogeneous resources and features. Besides 5G service deployment, such a service discovery architecture could provide the means for cross-service communication (CSC), that is, the consumption of a network service (NS) by another NS, empowering the service capabilities of the latter. This article presents a distributed service discovery framework for network service marketplaces (NSMs) in edge computing. We exemplify the operation of a new distributed service discovery mechanism that relies on a cache-based protocol for the discovery of NSs among edge clouds. We also present a multi-criteria ranking mechanism, which identifies the most suitable edge cloud according to the client's functional, performance, and cost requirements. Our evaluation results indicate that the proposed service discovery mechanism (SDM) yields service discovery effectiveness on par with other approaches, while drastically reducing the communication overhead.