Improving Joint Planning of MEC and Fiber Deployment with Duct and Optical Cable Sharing

In Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) network planning, the main goal is to find the optimal network topology, including the location and dimensioning of MEC data centers (MEC-DC), and the connections between them, with base stations (BSs), and with the wide area network (WAN) gateway for Internet and cloud services. Moreover, the assignment of traffic to the servers must also be solved. When solving that problem, it is especially important to consider the connections if the deployment has to be done in sparsely populated areas with long distances to interconnect and where it is likely to find no adequate infrastructure previously deployed. In a previous paper, we presented an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that solves that problem assuming straight and dedicated cable ducts between network nodes. However, reusing cables ducts and exploiting space division multiplexing (using different fibers of each cable to reach different nodes) can lead to more cost-effective solutions. Moreover, it is crucial to implement redundancy between MEC-DCs and WAN gateways to provide survivability against failures in this network segment. In this paper, we present a heuristic to improve the result obtained with our previous ILP formulation, assuming shared fiber ducts and cables, and creating a ring topology between MEC-DCs and WAN gateways. Results show that our proposal reduces the total deployment cost, while fulfilling latency constraints of MEC applications and providing fault tolerance.