Joint User Association and Server Scaling in Multi-access Edge Computing

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is recently acknowledged as one of the key pillars for the next revolution of mobile communications area to provide lower latency and more computation capability for cellular base stations (BSs). The trade-off of delay performance and energy cost which is fully controlled by the association decisions among systems of edge sites of mobile users and the service rate scaling of MEC servers to serve the user tasks is analyzed. In this paper, we formulate a joint user association and MEC server scaling optimization problem, namely MEC - MP. Accordingly, we first propose a centralized algorithm by iteratively solving the user association and MEC server scaling subproblems to obtain a suboptimal solution approach. We then propose a distributed algorithm based on a greedy user association strategy and decentralized solutions of the MEC server scaling problem.