Global Orchestration of Cooperative Defense against DDoS Attacks for MEC

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC), as an enabling paradigm allowing mobile services to be performed at the edge of mobile networks, has been commonly expected to facilitate real-time services and offload backhaul traffic. However, the security issues raised by innovations in networks always hesitate us to embrace their benefits, and so MEC does. DDoS attacks originating from massive mobile devices in 5G, especially the vulnerable internet-of-things devices, is an unavoidable threat for MEC services. Unfortunately, each MEC node is hard to maintain service availability in the wake of DDoS attacks, owing to its limited hardware resources for defense. Therefore, we are motivated to study the cooperative defense against DDoS attacks for MEC, where defense resources can be shared between MEC nodes. Specifically, we purpose a global orchestration (GO) mechanism to make full use of freedom degrees of cooperative defense with respect to the number of cooperative participants and the amount of cooperative resource. In the process of designing the GO mechanism, we formulate the optimization problem of GO, and exploit the bucket elimination algorithm to find the optimal solutions. To make the GO mechanism practically usable, we propose a scalable approximation algorithm based on the mini-bucket elimination algorithm. Extensive simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of GO.