Resource Allocation and Container Scaling for Microservices in Multi-Cluster Edge Computing System
With the advent of the 6G era and the evolution of distributed systems, edge computing has become a pivotal architecture for deploying latency-sensitive, resource-efficient applications. In particular, the microservice architecture, characterized by modular and loosely coupled components, has gained significant traction for building scalable and maintainable applications at the network edge. However, deploying microservice-based applications in heterogeneous and geographically distributed Multi-Cluster Edge Computing (MCEC) environments presents critical challenges, especially in achieving efficient and scalable resource management. Although existing research has explored resource allocation and container scaling for microservice-based systems, most prior works consider container efficiency in isolation or within single-cluster or cloud-centric environments, without jointly addressing container-level efficiency, inter-cluster task offloading, and resource allocation in MCEC scenarios. To address this gap, we propose RACCOON, a request-offloading cascaded resource allocation algorithm tailored for microservice-oriented deployments in MCEC settings. RACCOON aims to minimize user-perceived service latency while optimizing overall resource utilization. Complementing this, we introduce RASCAL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based container scaling mechanism that dynamically adjusts resource provisioning at the container level to further enhance system performance. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach consistently outperforms methods that address only resource allocation, only task offloading, or only container scaling, by jointly optimizing these dimensions to reduce end-to-end user-perceived latency and computational overhead.