Cooperative Service Caching and Workload Scheduling in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing is beneficial for reducing service response time and core network traffic by pushing cloud functionalities to network edge. Equipped with storage and computation capacities, edge nodes can cache services of resource-intensive and delay-sensitive mobile applications and process the corresponding computation tasks without outsourcing to central clouds. However, the heterogeneity of edge resource capacities and mismatch of edge storage and computation capacities make it difficult to fully utilize both the storage and computation capacities in the absence of edge cooperation. To address this issue, we consider cooperation among edge nodes and investigate cooperative service caching and workload scheduling in mobile edge computing. This problem can be formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, which has non-polynomial computation complexity. Addressing this problem faces challenges of sub-problem coupling, computation-communication tradeoff, and edge node heterogeneity. We develop an iterative algorithm named ICE to solve this problem. It is designed based on Gibbs sampling, which has provably near-optimal performance, and the idea of water filling, which has polynomial computation complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can jointly reduce the service response time and the outsourcing traffic, compared with the benchmark algorithms.