Request Dispatching for Minimizing Service Response Time in Edge Cloud Systems

Abstract

The emerging of mobile edge computing has significantly reduced the response time and Internet risk of service invocations. However, due to the distributed architecture and limited resources, balancing the load between edge servers to minimize the overall response time has become a critical objective for mobile edge computing. This problem is generally related to two aspects, request dispatching and service scheduling. To address this issue, we proposed a novel heuristic method called GASD (combined Genetic algorithm and simulated Annealing algorithm for Service request Dispatching). It tackles the problem by jointly conducting request dispatching and service scheduling. In addition, a solution combination algorithm is applied to reduce the computation complexity of the method. The experimental results show that the GASD method can achieve much lower overall response time than the compared methods. Moreover, the execution time of GASD is in a low order of magnitude and the algorithm performs excellent scalability as the experimental scale increases.