Virtual Machines Scheduling in Mobile Edge Computing: A Formal Concept Analysis Approach

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is providing cloud computing capabilities within the radio access networks and offering a new paradigm to liberate the mobile devices from heavy computational workloads. Importantly, MEC can effectively reduce latency, avoid congestion, and prolong the battery lifetime of mobile devices by offloading the computation tasks from the mobile devices to a physically proximal MEC servers. Particularly, Virtual Machines (VMs) scheduling is a critical issue for tasks offloading and computation in MEC. Regarding to the VMs scheduling problem in MEC environmnet, this paper pioneers the use of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) methodology for identifying the mapping from tasks to VMs. Specifically, the VMs profile and tasks descriptions are initially characterized as the formal contexts, respectively. With the constructed formal contexts, the corresponding formal concepts which refer to the rules set, are then generated. To better infuse the rules set of VMs and tasks, this paper defines a similarity measurement between formal concepts of VMs and tasks. Consequently, the matching problem from a given task to a virtual machine is to return the expected virtual machine according to the principle of maximum similarity degree between formal concepts of virtual machine and task. Extensive simulations are conducted with a real dataset for the validation of feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Specifically, the proposed approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption around 28 percent comparing to the approach without consideration of energy consumption. Overall, It is demonstrated that FCA-based VMs scheduling is a novel solution for a sustainable VMs scheduling in MEC environment.