MobiEdge: Mobile Service Provisioning for Edge Clouds with Time-varying Service Demands
Tao Wu, Xiaochen Fan, Yuben Qu, Panlong Yang · 2021
With the proliferation of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there has been an unprecedented growth of data consumption and computation requests at the network edge. To support latency-sensitive and resource-intensive mobile services, cellular base stations can be integrated with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technologies for service provisioning. MEC prompts flexible and configurable provisions of applications or services to make more efficient responses to mobile users' demands. Nevertheless, the time-varying nature of service demands inevitably becomes a vital challenge for existing service provisioning solutions. In this work, we propose MobiEdge, a multi-frame service provisioning scheme across two distinct timescales for MEC networks under various constraints of computation, communication and storage resources. We show that the large timescale indicated by ‘frame’ is more suitable for adjusting edge server activation and service placement, while the small timescale indicated by ‘time slot’ is more feasible to schedule users' requests. By leveraging the submodular techniques, we formulate a joint optimization problem and further propose an approximation algorithm with theoretical analysis and proofs. Synthetic and trace-driven evaluation results validate that MobiEdge can benefit both service providers and mobile users in MEC with high profits (e.g., 94% of the optimal) and a relatively low complexity.