Distance-aware Edge User Allocation with QoE Optimization

Nowadays, the world is witnessing a rapid development of edge computing. As an important issue in the edge computing paradigm, the edge user allocation (EUA) problem has attracted considerable attention. EUA aims at allocating the end-users in a specific area to the edge servers in that area, and ensure end-users' low-latency access to app vendor's services deployed on those edge servers. However, existing approaches simply assume that each edge server has a specific coverage and neglect the complexity of wireless signal transmission. To ensure end-users' low latency, an EUA approach must take into account the distance between end-users and their nearby edge servers, as it significantly impacts their Quality of Experience (QoE). Accordingly, EUA must maximize the overall QoE of the app vendor's users. To tackle this new distance-aware EUA problem, we propose two novel approaches, namely DEUA-O and DEUA-H. DEUA-O aims to find the optimal solution while DEUA-H aims to find the sub-optimal solution in large-scale scenarios efficiently. Four series of experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset to evaluate DEUA-O and DEUA-H. The results demonstrate the substantial gains of our approaches over the state-of-the-art.