A Fuzzy Logic-based Mechanism for An Efficient Cloud Resource Planning

The key concept beneath Multi-Access Edge Computing (MECs) is to place cloud resources in closer proximity to end-users, through the installation of small-scale cloud infrastructures at the network edge. In MEC environments, we identify two issues: 1) data about users' activities are not always available, and 2) the available virtual resource planning mechanisms (i.e., algorithms for the placement of Virtual Network Functions - VNFs) are not efficient enough to fulfill the QoS requirements and deployment costs. In this vein, we design a layered framework to define the presence of Mobile BroadBand User Equipments (UEs) and automate the underlying virtual resource placement and management based on the Fuzzy Logic Controller paradigm (FLC). Experimentation results show that our framework, compared to baseline solutions, achieves good performance results; the end-to-end delay is enhanced by 25%, the resource consumption is reduced by 30%, and the environmental impact, reflected by the carbon footprint that depends on the amount of deployed Virtual Machines (VMs), is reduced by 50%.