关键词： Task scheduling   mobile edge computing   overhead analysis   potential game   optimal strategy   RESOURCE  

摘要： In this paper, an overhead-optimizing multi-device task scheduling strategy for ad-hoc-based mobile edge computing system is proposed. This task scheduling strategy takes the opportunity consumption, time delay, energy consumption, and monetary cost into account, aiming at minimizing the overhead of each mobile device. First, a system model for ad-hoc-based mobile edge computing is presented and the overhead of mobile device is analyzed. Second, the task scheduling problem is formulated as a distributed multi-device task scheduling game. Then, by constructing a potential function, the task scheduling game is proved to be a potential game, which possesses a property of finite improvement and always owns a Nash equilibrium. Next, an overhead-optimizing multi-device task scheduling algorithm is designed and the computational complexity is analyzed. Finally, simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The results show that the proposed task scheduling strategy can effectively minimize the overhead of the mobile device and successfully complete the tasks.

关键词： Mobility   mobile edge computing   coded caching   probabilistic caching   throughput   stochastic geometry   trade-off  

摘要： Caching on the edge has been recognized as an effective solution to tackle the backhaul constraint of network densification. However, most related works ignored user mobility in wireless networks, which is unreasonable under the background of network densification. For a more flexible and context-aware caching decision, the concept of caching on the edge can be extended to mobile edge computing (MEC) that enables computation and storage resources at mobile edge networks. With MEC servers deployed on base stations, a huge amount of collected radio access network context data can be analyzed and utilized to render a caching scheme adaptive to user's context-aware information. In this regard, a novel mobility-aware coded probabilistic caching scheme is proposed for MEC-enabled small cell networks (SCNs). Different from previous mobility-aware caching schemes, user mobility and distributed storage are incorporated into a conventional probabilistic caching scheme, with the aim of throughput maximization. Based on stochastic geometry theory and a modified mobility model of discrete random jumps, the explicit expression of throughput is derived. Due to the complexity of the expression, two light-weight heuristic algorithms are provided to numerically obtain the optimal solutions. Moreover, a significant trade-off among the gains of mobility diversity, content diversity, and channel selection diversity is discussed, and we further numerically analyze how such a trade-off is influenced by user mobility, content popularity, and backhaul capacity, with some fundamental insights into the application of the proposed scheme in MEC-enabled SCNs. The superiority of our proposed scheme is demonstrated by the comparisons with the classical M most popular caching scheme and the conventional probabilistic caching scheme. Numerical results show that our proposed caching scheme achieves higher throughput than those of the other two, especially when users of intense mobility request contents, of which the popularity profile is not skew

关键词： Mobile edge computing   fog computing   mobile cloud computing   computation offloading   resource management   green computing   TO-DEVICE COMMUNICATION   SERVICE MIGRATION   CELLULAR NETWORKS   MANAGEMENT   RADIO   ARCHITECTURE   CLOUDLETS   PLACEMENT   RESOURCE   MIMO  

摘要： Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

关键词： Cloud   fog   mobile edge computing   ontology   overlay   Petri net   service composition   workflow net   PETRI NETS   SEMANTICS  

摘要： Content delivery through cloud networks has gained popularity due to the cloud's ability to provide on-demand services. However, composite services, such as customized multimedia content, introduce both delays and resource limitations if traditional cloud solutions are used. With recent advances in mobile edge computing, customized media delivery can be achieved through compositions of service specific overlays (SSOs). This paper presents a work flow-net-based mechanism for mobile edge node cooperation in fog-cloud networks to form guaranteed SSOs. The proposed solution uses a mathematical cooperation operator to turn the SSO composition problem expressed as workflow nets into algebraic representations. In turn, the minimal cost cooperative path from the workflow net is determined such that it guarantees the delivery of the requested composite media services to clients. Experimental results show that the composition process can be adequately established and carried out in a timely manner.

关键词： MEC   Multi-Access Edge Computing   Mobile Edge Computing   5G Mobile Communications   Edge Computing   Application Virtualization   Network Function Virtualization   Software Defined Networking   Network Softwarization   DISTRIBUTED MOBILITY MANAGEMENT   RESOURCE-ALLOCATION   SERVICE   OPTIMIZATION   CHALLENGES   DEPLOYMENT   INTERNET   DELIVERY   RADIO  

摘要： Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging ecosystem, which aims at converging telecommunication and IT services, providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network. MEC offers storage and computational resources at the edge, reducing latency for mobile end users and utilizing more efficiently the mobile backhaul and core networks. This paper introduces a survey on MEC and focuses on the fundamental key enabling technologies. It elaborates MEC orchestration considering both individual services and a network of MEC platforms supporting mobility, bringing light into the different orchestration deployment options. In addition, this paper analyzes the MEC reference architecture and main deployment scenarios, which offer multi-tenancy support for application developers, content providers, and third parties. Finally, this paper overviews the current standardization activities and elaborates further on open research challenges.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   fog computing   medical cyber physical system   cost efficiency   BASE STATION ASSOCIATION  

摘要： With the recent development in information and communication technology, more and more smart devices penetrate into people's daily life to promote the life quality. As a growing healthcare trend, medical cyber-physical systems (MCPSs) enable seamless and intelligent interaction between the computational elements and the medical devices. To support MCPSs, cloud resources are usually explored to process the sensing data from medical devices. However, the high quality-of-service of MCPS challenges the unstable and long-delay links between cloud data center and medical devices. To combat this issue, mobile edge cloud computing, or fog computing, which pushes the computation resources onto the network edge (e.g., cellular base stations), emerges as a promising solution. We are thus motivated to integrate fog computation and MCPS to build fog computing supported MCPS (FC-MCPS). In particular, we jointly investigate base station association, task distribution, and virtual machine placement toward cost-efficient FC-MCPS. We first formulate the problem into a mixed-integer non-linear linear program and then linearize it into a mixed integer linear programming (LP). To address the computation complexity, we further propose an LP-based two-phase heuristic algorithm. Extensive experiment results validate the high-cost efficiency of our algorithm by the fact that it produces near optimal solution and significantly outperforms a greedy algorithm.

关键词： Fog computing   mobile edge computing   cloudlets   crowd sourcing   crowd sensing   TO-DEVICE COMMUNICATIONS   COMMUNICATION  

摘要： The cloud computing paradigm faces the challenges of providing low latency, high availability, and real-time location-aware services where millions of people are mobile with respect to time and geographic location. In this paper, we propose a mobile edge computing framework that can support real-time, location-aware personalized services to a very large crowd. The framework uses a hybrid of cloud at the server end and fog computing terminals (FCTs) at the crowd edge. The concept of FCT is realized by adding a middle layer acting as a proxy between the user end and cloud infrastructure. Each FCT node covers a geographic zone and provides a subset of services and resources based on the geographic location of a mobile user. When a user moves from one FCT-covered zone to another, the secure handshaking of metadata about the user is shared with the new FCT node. The communication between mobile users' terminals, such as smartphone and the FCT, is assumed as 4G/5G networks, while the communication between the FCT and cloud is based on a high speed, always available, and reliable Internet connection. The location of each mobile user is made secure and shared according to our novel privacy policy paradigm. The framework is designed to switch between FCT and cloud, depending on the task, network condition, geographic nearness, and resources available within the client unit. We have implemented the framework to support context-aware services to millions of pilgrims that gather together in a very small area of land each year. We will share the inspiring results that we have gathered after initial deployment.

关键词： Mobile edge computing  

摘要： Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) is a novel and sustainable network architecture that enables energy conservation with cloud computing and network services offloading at the edge of mobile cellular networks. However, how to efficiently manage various real-time changing security functions is an essential issue which hinders the future MEC development. To address this problem, we propose a fuzzy security service chaining approach for MEC. In particular, a new architecture is designed to decouple the required security functions with the physical resources. Based on this, we present a security proxy to support compatibility to traditional security functions. Furthermore, to find the optimal order of the required security functions, we establish a fuzzy inference system (FIS) based mechanism to achieve multiple optimal objectives. Much work has been done to implement a prototype, which is used to analyze the performance by comparing with a widely used method. The results prove that the proposed FIS mechanism achieves an improved performance in terms of Inverted Generational Distance (IGD) values and execution time with respect to the compared solution.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   computation offloading   MEC SP and UE matching   combinational auction   demand heterogeneity   EFFICIENT RESOURCE-ALLOCATION   CLOUD   RADIO  

摘要： Via processing the computation intensive applications (apps) at the network edge, mobile edge computing (MEC) becomes a promising technology to enhance the ability of the user equipments (UEs). Most existing works usually focus on whether to offload or where to offload the apps under the premise that sufficient resources are owned by the network edge. However, the demand heterogeneity of UEs and the limitation of resources are usually failed to be considered. Since the limited resources may constrain the number of accessed UEs, how the MEC service providers (SPs) choose the UEs to serve while ensuring UEs' Quality of Service (QoS) is a key issue. Under this context, in this paper, we study the matching problem between the MEC SPs and the UEs in a multi-MEC and multi-UE scenario. Within this scenario, MEC SPs are equipped with limited wireless and computational resources. Auction theory is utilized to model the matching relationship between MEC SPs and UEs as the commodity trading. With this trading, UEs can obtain MEC service from SPs, when they successfully purchase the combinational resources (including computational and wireless resources) from SPs. To complete the auction process, a multi-round-sealed sequential combinatorial auction mechanism is proposed. The properties of the auction are proved and various simulation results are done to show that the proposed approach has better system performance compared with the existing algorithms.

关键词： Mobile edge computing   computation offloading   energy minimization   branch-and-bound method   reformulation-linearization-technique   Gini coefficient   CELLULAR NETWORKS   SAVE ENERGY   OPTIMIZATION   WIRELESS  

摘要： Mobile edge computing (MEC) providing information technology and cloud-computing capabilities within the radio access network is an emerging technique in fifth-generation networks. MEC can extend the computational capacity of smart mobile devices (SMDs) and economize SMDs' energy consumption by migrating the computation-intensive task to the MEC server. In this paper, we consider a multi-mobile-users MEC system, where multiple SMDs ask for computation offloading to a MEC server. In order to minimize the energy consumption on SMDs, we jointly optimize the offloading selection, radio resource allocation, and computational resource allocation coordinately. We formulate the energy consumption minimization problem as a mixed interger nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is subject to specific application latency constraints. In order to solve the problem, we propose a reformulation linearization-technique-based Branch-and-Bound (RLTBB) method, which can obtain the optimal result or a suboptimal result by setting the solving accuracy. Considering the complexity of RTLBB cannot be guaranteed, we further design a Gini coefficient-based greedy heuristic (GCGH) to solve the MINLP problem in polynomial complexity by degrading the MINLP problem into the convex problem. Many simulation results demonstrate the energy saving enhancements of RLTBB and GCGH.