Joint optimization of computing resources and data allocation for mobile edge computing (MEC): an online approach

In recent years, the rapid development of cloud computing, networking, and mobile computing have substantially promoted mobile edge computing (MEC). Currently, most of the MEC services can be roughly divided into two categories: computation offloading to accelerate computation and save the energy of mobile devices and data services to shorten the latency between the content providers and the mobile users. Although emerging services such as user-specified transcoding and AR/VR systems require joint optimization of computing resource allocation and data placement, there is little research on it. In this work, we carry out an in-depth study on the interaction of computing resource allocation and data placement in mobile edge computing environments. Based on the analysis of the temporal and spatial characteristics of the two tasks, we propose a joint optimization framework that works with online manner. The proposed method employs hybrid timescales: a coarse-grained timescale to update the data placement and a fine-grained timescale to decide computing resource allocation. The proposed method achieves provable near-optimal performance without buffering users' requirements and does not assume that future trends in user requirements are predictable.