Resource provisioning for highly reliable and ultra-responsive edge applications

Edge and fog computing are emerging concepts extending traditional cloud computing by deploying compute resources closer to the users. This approach, closely integrated with carrier-networks, enables several future services, such as tactile internet, 5G and beyond telco services, and extended reality applications. The emphasis is on integration: the rigorous delay constraints, ensuring reliability on the distributed remote nodes, and the sheer scale altogether call for a powerful provisioning platform that offers the applications the best out of the underlying infrastructure. In this paper we investigate the resource provisioning problem in the edge infrastructure with the consideration of probable failures. Our goal is to support high reliability of services with the minimum amount of edge resources reserved to provide the necessary redundancy in the system. We design a resource provisioning algorithm, which takes into account network latency when pinpointing backup placeholders for virtual functions of edge applications. We implement the proposed solution in a simulation environment and show the efficient resource utilization results achieved by our fast heuristic algorithm.