Online Service Provisioning and Updating in QoS-aware Mobile Edge Computing

The vigorous development of IoT technology has spawned a series of applications that are delay-sensitive or resource-intensive. Mobile edge computing is an emerging paradigm which provides services between end devices and traditional cloud data centers to users. However, with the continuously increasing investment of demands, it is nontrivial to maintain a higher quality-of-service (QoS) under the erratic activities of mobile users. In this paper, we investigate the service provisioning and updating problem under the multiple-users scenario by improving the performance of services with long-term cost constraints. We first decouple the original long-term optimization problem into a per-slot deterministic one by using Lyapunov optimization. Then, we propose two service updating decision strategies by considering the trajectory prediction conditions of users. Based on that, we design an online strategy by utilizing the committed horizon control method looking forward to multiple slots predictions. We prove the performance bound of our online strategy theoretically in terms of the trade-off between delay and cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.