A SURVEY ON MOBILITY-AWARE AND DELAY-SENSITIVE SERVICE PROVISIONING IN MOBILE EDGE-CLOUD NETWORKS

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a viable technique for pushing the cloud frontier to the network edge, enabling network services to be provisioned in close proximity to mobile consumers. Serving customers at the edge of the cloud can minimize service latency, lower operational costs, and increase network resource availability. Along with MEC, network function virtualization (NFV) is a viable strategy for implementing various network service functions as software in cloudlets (servers or clusters of servers). Giving mobile consumers virtualized network services can improve their service experience, simplify network service deployment, and make network resource management easier. However, mobile users roam arbitrarily inside networks, and different users often request various services with varying resource needs and latency requirements. As a result, it is a significant issue to provide dependable and smooth virtualized network services for mobile users in a MEC network while satisfying their specific latency needs, subject to network resource limits. This research focuses on the supply of virtualized network function services for mobile users in MEC while taking user mobility and service latency requirements into mind. We begin by posing two novel optimization issues for user service request admissions, with the goals of maximizing accumulative network utility and accumulative network throughput over a certain time horizon. Then, for the utility maximization issue, we design a constant approximation approach. We also create an online method for the problem of accumulative throughput maximization. Finally, we use experimental simulations to assess the performance of the suggested methods. The results of the experiments show that the proposed algorithms are promising.