Efficient Placement of Multi-Component Applications in Edge Computing Systems

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a new paradigm which has been introduced to solve the inefficiencies of mobile cloud computing technologies. The key idea behind MEC is to enhance the capabilities of mobile devices by forwarding the computation of applications to the edge of the network instead of to a cloud data-center. One of the main challenges in MEC is determining an efficient placement of the components of a mobile application on the edge servers that minimizes the cost incurred when running the application. In this paper, we address the problem of multi-component application placement in edge computing by designing an efficient heuristic on-line algorithm that solves it. We also present a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation of the multi-component application placement problem that takes into account the dynamic nature of users' location and the network capabilities. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm has very small execution time and obtains near optimal solutions.