Optimal Application Deployment in Resource Constrained Distributed Edges

TLDR

Mobile applications are proliferating, yet latency from unstable wireless networks and limited edge resources hampers performance, prompting the use of mobile edge computing with microservice deployments at the network edge. This study investigates how to optimally deploy microservice‑based applications in a MEC environment to minimize deployment cost while meeting performance requirements. We evaluate the proposed deployment strategy through a series of experiments measuring response time and resource utilization. The experiments demonstrate that the approach reduces average mobile service response time.

Abstract

The dramatically increasing of mobile applications make it convenient for users to complete complex tasks on their mobile devices. However, the latency brought by unstable wireless networks and the computation failures caused by constrained resources limit the development of mobile computing. A popular approach to solve this problem is to establish a mobile service provisioning system based on a mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm. In the MEC paradigm, plenty of machines are placed at the edge of the network so that the performance of applications can be optimized by using the involved microservice instances deployed on them. In this paper, we explore the deployment problem of microserivce-based applications in the MEC environment and propose an approach to help to optimize the cost of application deployment with the constraints of resources and the requirement of performance. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of our approach. The result shows that our approach can improve the average response time of mobile services.