Resilient placement of virtual process control functions in mobile edge clouds
Peiyue Zhao, György Dán · 2017
Virtual Process Control Functions (VPFs) are a promising solution for replacing hardware controllers in industrial control processes in order to improve operational efficiency. With the introduction of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in 5G networks, VPFs could even be executed on cloud resources close to the mobile network edge to further improve operational efficiency. Nonetheless, for this to happen, it is fundamental to ensure that the placement of VPFs be resilient to potential cyber-attacks and component failures, besides being efficient. In this paper we address this problem by considering that VPF placement costs are incurred by reserving MEC resources, executing VPF instances, and by data transmission. We formulate the VPF placement problem as an integer programming (IP) problem, with resilience as a constraint. We propose a VPF placement algorithm based on generalized Benders decomposition and based on linear relaxation of the resulting sub-problems, which effectively reduces the number of integer variables to that of the number of MEC nodes. We evaluate the proposed solution with respect to operational cost, efficiency, and scalability, and compare it with a greedy baseline algorithm. Extensive simulations show that our algorithm performs well in realistic scenarios.