Cost-Efficient Resource Provisioning for Dynamic Requests in Cloud Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing is emerging as a new computing paradigm that provides enhanced experience to mobile users via low latency connections and augmented computation capacity. As the amount of user requests is time-varying, while the computation capacity of edge hosts is limited, Cloud Assisted Mobile Edge (CAME) computing framework is introduced to improve the scalability of the edge platform. By outsourcing mobile requests to clouds with various types of instances, the CAME framework can accommodate dynamic mobile requests with diverse quality of service requirements. In order to provide guaranteed services at minimal system cost, the edge resource provisioning and cloud outsourcing of the CAME framework should be carefully designed in a cost-efficient manner. Specifically, two fundamental issues should be answered: (1) what is the optimal edge computation capacity configuration? and (2) what types of cloud instances should be tenanted and what is the amount of each type? To solve these issues, we formulate the resource provisioning in CAME framework as an optimization problem. By exploiting the piecewise convex property of this problem, the Optimal Resource Provisioning (ORP) algorithms with different instances are proposed, so as to optimize the computation capacity of edge hosts and meanwhile dynamically adjust the cloud tenancy strategy. The proposed algorithms are proved to be with polynomial computational complexity. To evaluate the performance of the ORP algorithms, extensive simulations and experiments are conducted based on both the widely-used traffic models and the Google cluster usage tracelogs, respectively. It is shown that the proposed ORP algorithms outperform the local-first and cloud-first benchmark algorithms in system flexibility and cost-efficiency.