Admission and Placement Policies for Latency-Compliant Secure Services in 5G Edge–Cloud System

Abstract

This article proposes an optimal admission and placement stochastic controller that inserts security and latency compliance in the operational aspects of edge–cloud system under a fifth generation (5G) deployment. The proposed mechanism uses the framework of semi-Markov decision making process and seeks for an optimal policy that efficiently allocates the virtual resources to secure and run the services across the cloudified infrastructure. Driven by a new latency-oriented cost structure, the optimal controller achieves a secure and latency compliant operation by optimally balancing the service requests between the edge and the cloud system taking into account the service profile, the workload, and the traffic load. A structural analysis of the optimal policy reveals its implementation friendliness, which is key for its deployment or derivation of suboptimal mechanisms. Numerical results unveil that the admission and placement decision making process does not adversely impact the performance of the admission decision making process. Finally, a cloudnomics analysis shows that the optimal cost can be further optimized by fine tuning the parameters of the proposed cost structure. In this respect, numerical results show a reduction of approximately 162% for some cases of the scenario under analysis.