A Heuristic for Load Distribution on Data Center Hierarchy: A MEC Approach

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) extends Cloud Computing to the edge of the network, creating a hierarchy of data centers. This paradigm provides computing capacity close to final users, relieves backhaul and the leading network, and serves latency-sensitive applications. When providing computing services at different network levels, it becomes necessary to carry out a more efficient distribution of the resources that come to coexist. A random allocation of these resources can lead to a low service acceptance rate and backhaul overhead problems. Problems like these can be solved with MEC. To maximize the service acceptance and ensure a fair distribution of services in the kinds of servers guaranteeing their quality of service requirements, we propose a MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming). The model performs an optimal allocation of applications in a two-level hierarchy of data centers: (i) MEC and (ii) cloud computing. On a large scale, the use of MILP becomes unfeasible due to the high computational cost, so we propose a heuristic based on the application profiles. We compare the proposed heuristic with two metaheuristics: (i) Genetic Algorithm and (ii) Particle Swarm Optimization. The solutions are compared in terms of service acceptance rate, large-scale performance, and efficient use of available resources. Results show that the proposed heuristic reaches 91% of the optimal solution and over 140% compared to GA and PSO solutions.