A File-Centric Collaborative Migration Framework for Containerized Services in Edge Computing

Containerized edge services must often be migrated when users move, resources fluctuate, or access latency degrades. Existing migration systems mainly reuse complete image layers or relocate containers after an orchestration decision has already been made. They therefore miss duplicated files hidden inside non-shareable layers and transfer unnecessary image and writable-layer data. This paper proposes a file-centric collaborative migration framework for containerized edge services. This framework preserves native layer sharing but extends reuse to file granularity through a layer-preserving file repository, SHA-256 based file metadata, and a pipelined migration procedure that pre-transfers static files and checkpoints before the final stop phase. It further eliminates Copy-on-Write (CoW) redundancy by transferring only new files and modified blocks in the writable layer. We implement and evaluate a proof of concept on a VMbased emulated edge testbed under controlled network conditions. Experiments show that our method reduces total migration time, the stop-phase container-layer transfer time that dominates service downtime, and estimated edge-node transmission energy compared with state-of-the-art approaches.