Placing Multi-Component Applications in the Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-access Edge Computing resolves the problem of the transportation of enormous amounts of data via the Internet by localizing the computation and the storage of data near the user. The offloading of applications to the MEC Servers must be done in a way that minimizes the latency while considering their limited resources. Additionally, there is a trend for applications to be separated into microservices that run on different MEC Servers. This adds complexity to the placement of applications on the MEC Servers because it has to take into consideration the dependencies of its microservices. This problem is defined in the literature as the multi-component application placement problem. This paper proposes an algorithm to tackle this problem efficiently, while the dependencies of services are linear, i.e., a chain of microservices. The algorithm starts with the allocation of the 1-medlan of the backhaul network. Then, the proposed algorithm extends outwards and moves around until the score function stops improving. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm a Mixed-integer Quadratic Program is formulated. The results showed that the proposed algorithm achieved great performance in various cases.