Optimal Placement of Virtual Machines in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC), as an extension of the cloud computing paradigm to the edge network, is a promising solution to provide resource-intensive and time-critical applications to mobile users. It overcomes some obstacles of traditional mobile cloud computing by offering ultra-short latency and less core network traffic. This paper proposes a new framework based on the architecture of MEC to deliver cloud services to the edge. We introduce enumeration based optimal placement algorithm (EOPA) and divide-and-conquer based near-optimal placement algorithm (DCNOPA) to attain minimal data traffic by distributing virtual machine replica copies (VRCs) of applications to the edge network. Simulation results show that compared to the famous K-medians clustering algorithm (KMCA), the performance of DCNOPA is much closer to that of EOPA with lower computational complexity. Furthermore, we investigate the optimal number of VRCs within a given limitation of benefit-to-cost ratio.