missing at the destination are transferred. Our framework applies to both virtual machines and containers and can be readily implemented with existing tools. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on live migration of MEC applications in a container-based environment.

In the rest of this article, we first summarize the motivation and background, then propose our layered framework for live service migration and its experimentation results.

Live Service Migration: Motivation and Background
=================================================

The need for live service migration in MECs can be illustrated with the example shown in Figure \[fig:architecture\]. Here, mobile user 2 is initially connected to its service running on MEC 1. The direct connection between user 2 and MEC 1 ensures low-latency access to the service. However, after some time, user 2 moves to a location that does not have direct connection to MEC 1; it has direct connection to MEC 2 instead. As shown in [@ha2015adaptive], connecting to MEC 1 in such cases would incur a significantly higher latency (due to backhaul network communication) than connecting to MEC 2 directly. It can be therefore beneficial to migrate user 2’s service from MEC 1 to MEC 2, so that user 2 