A Long-Term Cost-Oriented Cloudlet Planning Method in Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

As an extension of remote cloud data centers, cloudlets process the workloads from mobile users at the network edge, thereby satisfying the requirements of resource-intensive and latency-sensitive applications. One of the fundamental yet important issues for cloudlet infrastructure providers (ISP) is how to plan the placement and capacities of cloudlets so that minimize their long-term cost with a guarantee on service delay. However, existing work mostly focuses on resource provision or resource management for mobile services on existing cloudlets, while very little attention has been paid to the cloudlet placement and capacity planning problem. In contrast to those studies, we aim to optimize the long-term total cost of cloudlets' ISPs through intelligently planning the location and capacities of cloudlets under constraints on the service delay experienced by mobile users. This problem is then decomposed into two sub-problems and algorithms are devised to solve it. Evaluations on randomly generated traces and real traces exhibit the superior performance of the proposed solution on saving ISP's long-term cost.