Computing Power Allocation and Traffic Scheduling for Edge Service Provisioning

The increasing number of mobile web services makes it convenient for users to complete complex tasks on their mobile devices. However, the latency brought by unstable wireless networks and the computation failures caused by constrained resources limit the development of mobile computing. A popular approach to solve this problem is to establish a mobile service provisioning system based on the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm, in which the latency can be reduced and the computation can be offloaded with the help of services deployed on nearby edge servers. However, as the edge servers are resource-limited, we should be more careful in allocating the edge resource to services, as well as designing the traffic scheduling strategy. In this paper, we investigate the edge-cloud cooperation mechanism in service provisioning as well as the billing model of it. To minimize the average service response time and make the expense acceptable, we model and formulate the performance-cost service provisioning problem as a joint optimization problem whose decision variables are the resource allocation strategy and traffic scheduling strategy. Then we propose an efficient online algorithm, called PCA-CATS, to decompose this problem into two individual subproblems. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of our approach. The results show that PCA-CATS can easily balance the performance and expense with a factor V, and can reduce up to 53.3% service response time as compared with the baselines.