Dynamical Service Deployment and Replacement in Resource-Constrained Edges

With the rapid development of mobile computing technology, more and more complex tasks are now able to be fulfilled on users’ mobile devices with an increasing number of novel services. However, the development of mobile computing is limited by the latency brought by unstable wireless network and the computation failure caused by the constrained resources of mobile devices. Therefore, people turn to establish a service provisioning system based on mobile edge computing (MEC) model to solve this problem. With the help of services deployed on edge servers, the latency can be reduced and the computation can be offloaded. Though the edge servers have more available resources than mobile devices, they are still resource-constrained, so they must carefully choose the services for deployment. In this paper, we focus on improving performance of the service provisioning system by deploying and replacing services on edge servers. Firstly, we design and implement a prototype of service provisioning system that simulates the behaviors between users and servers. Secondly, we propose an approach to deploy services on edge servers before the launching of these servers, and propose an approach to replace services on edge servers dynamically. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of our approaches. The result shows that our approach can improve the performance of service provisioning systems.