QoE-Constrained Concurrent Request Optimization Through Collaboration of Edge Servers

Abstract

Cloud computing, which is claimed to provide plentiful storage, computational, and other resources, has become a promising platform to support resource-intensive applications. Due to the wide adoption of smart things to support domain applications and considering the delay-sensitivity of certain requests and limited network capacity compared with huge data packets to be transmitted, the quality of experience (QoE) may be hard to be satisfied when requests are solely supported by cloud computing. In this setting, edge computing has become an infrastructure to facilitate request satisfaction at the network edge. This article proposes a mechanism to optimize the collaboration of heterogeneous edge servers with certain QoE constraints. Specifically, concurrent requests, which are usually represented in terms of SQL queries, are rewritten as atomic queries, and these atomic queries are optimally assigned to edge servers through adopting an algorithm inspired by the minimum spanning tree, where QoE factors, including the delay, size of data packets, and number of operators, are considered. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed mechanism can effectively improve the QoE of requests compared with the state-of-the-art’s mechanisms.