Proactive Self-Healing Approaches in Mobile Edge Computing: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The widespread use of technology has made communication technology an indispensable part of daily life. However, the present cloud infrastructure is insufficient to meet the industry’s growing demands, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a solution by providing real-time computation closer to the data source. Effective management of MEC is essential for providing high-quality services, and proactive self-healing is a promising approach that anticipates and executes remedial operations before faults occur. This paper aims to identify, evaluate, and synthesize studies related to proactive self-healing approaches in MEC environments. The authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) using four well-known digital libraries (IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, ProQuest, and Scopus) and one academic search engine (Google Scholar). The review retrieved 920 papers, and 116 primary studies were selected for in-depth analysis. The SLR results are categorized into edge resource management methods and self-healing methods and approaches in MEC. The paper highlights the challenges and open issues in MEC, such as offloading task decisions, resource allocation, and security issues, such as infrastructure and cyber attacks. Finally, the paper suggests future work based on the SLR findings.