Abstract
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising network computing paradigm associated with mobile devices at local areas to diminish network latency under the employment and utilization of cloud/edge computing resources. In that context, MEC solutions are required to dynamically allocate mobile requests as close as possible to their computing resources. Moreover, the computing power and resource capacity of MEC server machines can directly impact the performance and operational availability of mobile apps and services. The systems practitioners must understand the trade off between performance and availability in systems design stages. The analytical models are suited to such an objective. Therefore, this paper proposes Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models to evaluate both performance and availability of MEC environments. Different to previous work, our proposal includes unique metrics such as discard probability and a sensitivity analysis that guides the evaluation decisions. The models are highly flexible by considering fourteen transitions at the base model and twenty-five transitions at the extended model. The performance model was validated with a real experiment, the result of which indicated equality between experiment and model with p-value equal to 0.684 by t-Test. Regarding availability, the results of the extended model, different from the base model, always remain above 99%, since it presents redundancy in the components that were impacting availability in the base model. A numerical analysis is performed in a comprehensive manner, and the output results of this study can serve as a practical guide in designing MEC computing system architectures by making it possible to evaluate the trade-off between Mean Response Time (MRT) and resource utilization.
Highlights
The master server is responsible for receiving requests from mobile devices and distributing them between slave servers
We present two Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models focusing on the availability evaluation of the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) architecture previously presented
The master server is responsible for receiving requests from mobile devices and distributing them to slave nodes, so the software component called load balancer is responsible for such distribution
Summary
MEC aims to enable the billions of connected mobile devices to execute the real-time compute-intensive applications directly at the network edge. There is a lack of studies evaluating MEC architectures through analytical models in terms of performance and availability. This paper presents SPN models to evaluate MEC architecture with significant difference to the literature, including sensitivity analysis and unique metrics, such as discard probability of requests and resource utilization level. SPN models, which are useful tools for system administrators to evaluate the performance and availability of MEC architectures, even before they are deployed. Other types of models could be used, for example the Markov Chains, SPNs are equivalent to these models with higher representativeness; Sensitivity analysis under the SPN models parameters to identify the most important components; Case studies that provide a practical guide to performance and availability analysis in MEC architectures.
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