Evaluating Scheduling Algorithms for Adaptive Orchestration in Federated Tactical Edge Cloud Environments

Alessandro Amato, Harrie Bastiaansen, Jared Ray Coleman, Willem Datema, Mattia Fogli, Johan van der Geest, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Thomas Kudla, Pablo Sanchez, Niranjan Suri

Abstract: The IST-193 Research Task Group (RTG) has focused on adapting the popular Kubernetes cloud native platform to operate in military tactical network environments consisting of transient, mobile nodes and intermittent and limited network connectivity. A key focus area for the group has been designing the Federated Adaptive Orchestrator, which is responsible for deciding where services should be run among the tactical cloud environments that are available. This paper focuses on the evaluation of a variety of scheduling algorithms in terms of their performance during the orchestration process and compares them to the performance of a brute-force algorithm that tries to find the most optimal solution. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Scientific and Technical Committee, IST-209-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Oeiras, Portugal, 13–14 May 2025.