  Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging network paradigm that provides
cloud and IT services at the point of access of the network. Such proximity to
the end user translates into ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, while, at
the same time, it alleviates traffic congestion in the network core. Due to the
need to run servers on edge nodes (e.g., an LTE-A macro eNodeB), a key element
of MEC architectures is to ensure server portability and low overhead. A
possible tool that can be used for this purpose is Docker, a framework that
allows easy, fast deployment of Linux containers. This paper addresses the
suitability of Docker in MEC scenar- ios by quantifying the CPU consumed by
Docker when running two different containerized services: multiplayer gam- ing
and video streaming. Our tests, run with varying numbers of clients and
servers, yield different results for the two case studies: for the gaming
service, the overhead logged by Docker increases only with the number of
servers; con- versely, for the video streaming case, the overhead is not
affected by the number of either clients or servers.
