Efficient Edge Service Migration in Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Edge computing is one of the emerging technologies aiming to enable timely computation at the network edge. With virtualization technologies, the role of the traditional edge providers is separated into two: edge infrastructure providers (EIPs), who manage the physical edge infrastructure, and edge service providers (ESPs), who purchase slices of physical resources (e.g., CPU, bandwidth, memory space, disk storage) from EIPs and then cache service entities to offer their own value-added services to end users. These value-added services are also called virtual network function or VNF. As we know, edge computing environments are dynamic, and the requirements of edge service for computing resources usually fluctuate over time. Thus, when the demand of a VNF cannot be satisfied, we need to design the strategies for migrating the VNF so as to meet its demand and retain the network performance. In this paper, we concentrate on migrating VNFs efficiently (MV), such that the migration can meet the bandwidth requirement for data transmission. We prove that MV is NP-complete. We present several exact and heuristic solutions to tackle it. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed heuristics are efficient and effective.