TY - JOUR
T1 - Reliability-aware network service provisioning in mobile edge-cloud networks
AU - Li, Jing
AU - Liang, Weifa
AU - Huang, Meitian
AU - Jia, Xiaohua
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 1990-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/7/1
Y1 - 2020/7/1
N2 - The Mobile Edge-Cloud (MEC) network has emerged as a promising networking paradigm to address the conflict between increasing computing-intensive applications and resource-constrained mobile Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices with portable size and storage. In MEC environments, Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) are deployed for provisioning network services to users to reduce the service cost on top of dedicated hardware infrastructures. However, VNFs may suffer from failures and malfunctions while network service providers have to guarantee continuously reliable services to their consumers to meet the ever-growing service demands of users, thereby securing their revenues for the service. In this article, we focus on reliable VNF service provisioning in MECs, by placing primary and backup VNF instances to cloudlets in an MEC network to meet the service reliability requirements of users. We first formulate a novel VNF service reliability problem with the aim to maximize the revenue collected by admitting as many as user requests while meeting their different reliability requirements, assuming that requests arrive into the system one by one without the knowledge of future arrivals, and the admission or rejection decision must be made immediately. We then develop two efficient online algorithms for the problem under two different backup schemes: the on-site (local) and off-site (remote) schemes, by adopting the primal-dual updating technique. Both algorithms achieve provable competitive ratios with bounded moderate resource capacity violations. We finally evaluate the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising, compared with existing baseline algorithms.
AB - The Mobile Edge-Cloud (MEC) network has emerged as a promising networking paradigm to address the conflict between increasing computing-intensive applications and resource-constrained mobile Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices with portable size and storage. In MEC environments, Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) are deployed for provisioning network services to users to reduce the service cost on top of dedicated hardware infrastructures. However, VNFs may suffer from failures and malfunctions while network service providers have to guarantee continuously reliable services to their consumers to meet the ever-growing service demands of users, thereby securing their revenues for the service. In this article, we focus on reliable VNF service provisioning in MECs, by placing primary and backup VNF instances to cloudlets in an MEC network to meet the service reliability requirements of users. We first formulate a novel VNF service reliability problem with the aim to maximize the revenue collected by admitting as many as user requests while meeting their different reliability requirements, assuming that requests arrive into the system one by one without the knowledge of future arrivals, and the admission or rejection decision must be made immediately. We then develop two efficient online algorithms for the problem under two different backup schemes: the on-site (local) and off-site (remote) schemes, by adopting the primal-dual updating technique. Both algorithms achieve provable competitive ratios with bounded moderate resource capacity violations. We finally evaluate the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising, compared with existing baseline algorithms.
KW - Cloudlet failure
KW - Competitive ratio analysis
KW - Fault-tolerance
KW - Mobile edge computing (mec)
KW - Mobile edge-cloud networks
KW - Online algorithms
KW - Reliability-aware service provisioning
KW - Resource allocation and optimization
KW - Revenue maximization
KW - Software failure
KW - The primal-dual dynamic updating technique
KW - Virtualized network function (vnf)
KW - Virtualized service functions (vnfs)
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081172925&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TPDS.2020.2970048
DO - 10.1109/TPDS.2020.2970048
M3 - Article
SN - 1045-9219
VL - 31
SP - 1545
EP - 1558
JO - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
IS - 7
M1 - 8974390
ER -