Deterministic consumer applications enabled Policy Architecture of Mobile Edge Computing ecosystem
Vikas S. Shah · 2017
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology confirms paradigm shift in enabling efficient consumer specific services by providing processing capacity within the access range of the mobile devices. Servers are placed at the edge of the mobile networks in a way that consumer applications (CAs) such as smart grid, content delivery networks, traffic management, and electronic health applications can benefit from the large scale deployments in the advancements of digital channels. It introduces complexity of managing policies at large scale deployments that offers multifaceted applications to millions of consumers at the edge. The characteristics of engaged consumers and their information are diversified based on the numerous different paradigms. These paradigms are required to be managed, controlled, updated, and evaluated to domicile policies. We present deterministic approach to enable consumers through the application programing interface (API) management in MEC ecosystem. Edge Policy Architecture (EPA) derived in this paper is a proactive framework to CAs in MEC. In particular, API enablement engine serves as a route to marketplace and consumption of the APIs. EPA identifies set of primitives that are sufficient to specify policy driven consumer APIs for MEC. Policy APIs can be defined and categorized based on their characteristics pertaining to the MEC dimensions. We find that EPA reduces the complexity and effort to architect consumer APIs and CAs on MEC through multidimensional policy APIs. Continuous evaluation mechanism is illustrated to attune the operatives of APIs and corresponding CAs during the amplifications of the policy APIs.