The proliferation of innovative mobile services such as augmented reality,
networked gaming, and autonomous driving has spurred a growing need for
low-latency access to computing resources that cannot be met solely by existing
centralized cloud systems. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is expected to be an
effective solution to meet the demand for low-latency services by enabling the
execution of computing tasks at the network-periphery, in proximity to
end-users. While a number of recent studies have addressed the problem of
determining the execution of service tasks and the routing of user requests to
corresponding edge servers, the focus has primarily been on the efficient
utilization of computing resources, neglecting the fact that non-trivial
amounts of data need to be stored to enable service execution, and that many
emerging services exhibit asymmetric bandwidth requirements. To fill this gap,
we study the joint optimization of service placement and request routing in
MEC-enabled multi-cell networks with multidimensional
(storage-computation-communication) constraints. We show that this problem
generalizes several problems in literature and propose an algorithm that
achieves close-to-optimal performance using randomized rounding. Evaluation
results demonstrate that our approach can effectively utilize the available
resources to maximize the number of requests served by low-latency edge cloud
servers.Comment: IEEE Infocom 201
