Mobile micro-clouds are promising for enabling performance-critical cloud applications. However, one challenge therein is the dynamics at the network edge. In this paper, we study how to place service instances to cope with these dynamics, where multiple users and service instances coexist in the system. Our goal is to find the optimal placement (configuration) of instances to minimize the average cost over time, leveraging the ability of predicting future cost parameters with known accuracy. We first propose an offline algorithm that solves for the optimal configuration in a specific look-ahead time-window. Then, we propose an online approximation algorithm with polynomial time-complexity to find the placement in real-time whenever an instance arrives. We analytically show that the online algorithm is $O(1)$-competitive for a broad family of cost functions. Afterwards, the impact of prediction errors is considered and a method for finding the optimal look-ahead window size is proposed, which minimizes an upper bound of the average actual cost. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by simulations with both synthetic and real-world (San Francisco taxi) user-mobility traces. The theoretical methodology used in this paper can potentially be applied to a larger class of dynamic resource allocation problems.
In recent years, deep learning models have become ubiquitous in industry and academia alike. Modern deep neural networks can solve one of the most complex problems today, but coming with the price of massive compute and storage requirements. This makes deploying such massive neural networks challenging in the mobile edge computing paradigm, where edge nodes are resource-constrained, hence limiting the input analysis power of such frameworks. Semantic and layer-wise splitting of neural networks for distributed processing show some hope in this direction. However, there are no intelligent algori…
Network function Virtualization (NFV) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are promising 5G technologies to support resource-demanding mobile applications. In NFV, one must process the service function chain (SFC) in which a set of network functions must be executed in a specific order. Moreover, the MEC technology enables computation offloading of service requests from mobile users to remote servers to potentially reduce energy consumption and processing delay for the mobile application. This paper considers the optimization of the computation offloading, resource allocation, and SFC placement in …
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is emerging to support delay-sensitive 5G applications at the edge of mobile networks. When a user moves erratically among multiple MEC nodes, the challenge of how to dynamically migrate its service to maintain service performance (i.e., user-perceived latency) arises. However, frequent service migration can significantly increase operational cost, incurring the conflict between improving performance and reducing cost. To address these mis-aligned objectives, this paper studies the performance optimization of mobile edge service placement under the constraint of lon…
Fog computing reduces the latency induced by distant clouds by enabling the deployment of some application components at the edge of the network, on fog nodes, while keeping others in the cloud. Application components can be implemented as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and their execution sequences can be modeled by a combination of sub-structures like sequence, parallel, selection, and loops. Efficient placement algorithms are required to map the application components onto the infrastructure nodes. Current solutions do not consider the mobility of fog nodes, a phenomenon which may happen …
We propose a cloudlet network architecture to bring the computing resources from the centralized cloud to the edge. Thus, each User Equipment (UE) can communicate with its Avatar, a software clone located in a cloudlet, with lower end-to-end (E2E) delay. However, UEs are moving over time, and so the low E2E delay may not be maintained if UEs' Avatars stay in their original cloudlets. Thus, live Avatar migration (i.e., migrating a UE's Avatar to a suitable cloudlet based on the UE's location) is enabled to maintain low E2E delay between each UE and its Avatar. On the other hand, the migration i…
Mobile clients that consume and produce data are abundant in fog environments and low latency access to this data can only be achieved by storing it in their close physical proximity. To adapt data replication in fog data stores in an efficient manner and make client data available at the fog node that is closest to the client, the systems need to predict both client movement and pauses in data consumption. In this paper, we present variations of Markov model algorithms that can run on clients to increase the data availability while minimizing excess data. In a simulation, we find the availabi…
Mobile edge computing is a new cloud computing paradigm which makes use of small-sized edge-clouds to provide real-time services to users. These mobile edge-clouds (MECs) are located in close proximity to users, thus enabling users to seamlessly access applications running on MECs. Due to the co-existence of the core (centralized) cloud, users, and one or multiple layers of MECs, an important problem is to decide where (on which computational entity) to place different components of an application. This problem, known as the application or workload placement problem, is notoriously hard, and t…
School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学数据科学与计算机学院）
Mobile edge computing is a new computing paradigm, which pushes cloud computing capabilities away from the centralized cloud to the network edge. However, with the sinking of computing capabilities, the new challenge incurred by user mobility arises: since end-users typically move erratically, the services should be dynamically migrated among multiple edges to maintain the service performance, i.e., user-perceived latency. Tackling this problem is non-trivial since frequent service migration would greatly increase the operational cost. To address this challenge in terms of the performance-cost…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Loughborough University（拉夫堡大学）
In recent years, deep learning models have become ubiquitous in industry and academia alike. Deep neural networks can solve some of the most complex pattern-recognition problems today, but come with the price of massive compute and memory requirements. This makes the problem of deploying such large-scale neural networks challenging in resource-constrained mobile edge computing platforms, specifically in mission-critical domains like surveillance and healthcare. To solve this, a promising solution is to split resource-hungry neural networks into lightweight disjoint smaller components for pipel…
MicroService Architecture (MSA) is gaining rapid popularity for developing large-scale IoT applications for deployment within distributed and resource-constrained Fog computing environments. As a cloud-native application architecture, the true power of microservices comes from their loosely coupled, independently deployable and scalable nature, enabling distributed placement and dynamic composition across federated Fog and Cloud clusters. Thus, it is necessary to develop novel microservice placement algorithms that utilise these microservice characteristics to improve the performance of the ap…
Mobile clients that consume and produce data are abundant in fog environments. Low latency access to this data can only be achieved by storing it in close physical proximity to the clients. Current data store systems fall short as they do not replicate data based on client movement. We propose an approach to predictive replica placement that autonomously and proactively replicates data close to likely client locations.
Mobile micro-cloud is an emerging technology in distributed computing, which is aimed at providing seamless computing/data access to the edge of the network when a centralized service may suffer from poor connectivity and long latency. Different from the traditional cloud, a mobile micro-cloud is smaller and deployed closer to users, typically attached to a cellular basestation or wireless network access point. Due to the relatively small coverage area of each basestation or access point, when a user moves across areas covered by different basestations or access points which are attached to di…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) emerges as a promising solution for servicing delay-sensitive tasks at the edge network. A body of recent literature started to focus on cost-efficient service placement and request scheduling. This work investigates the joint optimization of service placement and request scheduling in a dense MEC network, and develops an efficient online algorithm that achieves close-to-optimal performance. Our online algorithm consists of two basic modules: (1) a regularization with look-ahead approach from competitive online convex optimization, for decomposing the offline relaxe…
Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is booming as a promising paradigm to push the computation and communication resources from cloud to the network edge to provide services and to perform computations. With container technologies, mobile devices with small memory footprint can run composite microservice-based applications without time-consuming backbone. Service placement at the edge is of importance to put MEC from theory into practice. However, current state-of-the-art research does not sufficiently take the composite property of services into consideration. Besides, although Kubernetes has c…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technique for providing low-latency access to services at the network edge. The services are hosted at various types of edge nodes with both computation and communication capabilities. Due to the heterogeneity of edge node characteristics and user locations, the performance of MEC varies depending on where the service is hosted. In this paper, we consider such a heterogeneous MEC system, and focus on the problem of placing multiple services in the system to maximize the total reward. We show that the problem is NP-hard via reduction from the set cover…
