Migration-Aware Network Services With Edge Computing

Atri Mukhopadhyay,George Iosifidis,Marco Ruffini

doi:10.1109/tnsm.2021.3139857

Abstract

The development of Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has resulted from the requirement for supporting next generation mobile services, which need high capacity, high reliability and low latency. The key issue in such MEC architectures is to decide which edge nodes will be employed for serving the needs of the different end users. Here, we take a fresh look into this problem by focusing on the minimization of migration events rather than focusing on maximizing usage of resources. This is important because service migrations can create significant service downtime to applications that need low latency and high reliability, in addition to increasing traffic congestion in the underlying network. This paper introduces a priority induced service migration minimization (PrISMM) algorithm, which aims at minimizing service migration for both high and low priority services, through the use of Markov decision process, learning automata and combinatorial optimization. We carry out extensive simulations and produce results showing its effectiveness in reducing the mean service downtime of lower priority services and the mean admission time of the higher priority services.

Highlights

In the past few years, the emergence of revolutionary applications has resulted in an explosive increase in the usage of hand-held mobile devices like smartphones and tablets
We provide the simulation set up, the metrics, the baseline cases that were used to evaluate the performance of priority induced service migration minimization (PrISMM) and the comparative performance results of PrISMM against the four baseline cases
We presented a novel approach to the service allocation problem, by focusing on the minimization of migrations, when services with different priorities, but with similar low latency and high capacity constraints, share the same network

Summary

Introduction

In the past few years, the emergence of revolutionary applications has resulted in an explosive increase in the usage of hand-held mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The unprecedented deployment of resource constrained nodes in the form of Internet-of-Things (IoT), have been made in order to penetrate fields like health, transportation, industry, smart home, smart city, agriculture and education [1]. Both of these scenarios involve enormous volumes of raw data transfer with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements [2], [3]. The idea of multi-access edge computing (MEC) servers situated close to the end-users was materialised in order to process computations and store cached content on behalf of mobile devices [4]–[6].

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Conclusion