  Service mesh is getting widely adopted as the cloud-native mechanism for
traffic management in microservice-based applications, in particular for
generic IT workloads hosted in more centralized cloud environments.
Performance-demanding applications continue to drive the decentralization of
modern application execution environments, as in the case of mobile edge cloud.
  This paper presents a systematic and qualitative analysis of state-of-the-art
service mesh to evaluate how suitable its design is for addressing the traffic
management needs of performance-demanding application workloads hosted in a
mobile edge cloud environment. With this analysis, we argue that today's
dependability-centric service mesh design fails at addressing the needs of the
different types of emerging mobile edge cloud workloads and motivate further
research in the directions of performance-efficient architectures, stronger QoS
guarantees and higher complexity abstractions of cloud-native traffic
management frameworks.
