Efficient Resource Management and Expansion Scheme for Collaborative Edge-Cloud Computing

Integrating the advantages of both the edge and the cloud, the edge-cloud computing system emerges to provide high-quality computing services for mobile users. To improve system efficiency, we investigate a hybrid mode of resource collaboration and expansion for the edge-cloud computing system, in which edge servers not only can collaborate with the cloud by purchasing high-priority computation resources temporarily but also can expand their local computation resources permanently. In such a way, the edge server can maximize its long-term profit by making a trade-off between the purchasing cost and the expanding cost. By formulating the resource management problem as a long-term profit maximization one, we first analyze the relationships among the expected minimal purchasing cost, the computation delay, and the available computation resources. Then, we design an efficient resource reserving and expanding scheme to determine the optimal expected amounts of reserving resources and expansion resources. Next, we propose an efficient real-time resource purchasing scheme to obtain the optimal amount of real-time purchasing resources dynamically. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed efficient resource collaboration and expanding scheme can maximize the long-term profit while guaranteeing the computation delay.