Multivariate LSTM-Based Location-Aware Workload Prediction for Edge Data Centers

Mobile Edge Clouds (MECs) is a promising computing platform to overcome challenges for the success of bandwidth-hungry, latency-critical applications by distributing computing and storage capacity in the edge of the network as Edge Data Centers (EDCs) within the close vicinity of end-users. Due to the heterogeneous distributed resource capacity in EDCs, the application deployment flexibility coupled with the user mobility, MECs bring significant challenges to control resource allocation and provisioning. In order to develop a self-managed system for MECs which efficiently decides how much and when to activate scaling, where to place and migrate services, it is crucial to predict its workload characteristics, including variations over time and locality. To this end, we present a novel location-aware workload predictor for EDCs. Our approach leverages the correlation among workloads of EDCs in a close physical distance and applies multivariate Long Short-Term Memory network to achieve on-line workload predictions for each EDC. The experiments with two real mobility traces show that our proposed approach can achieve better prediction accuracy than a state-of-the art location-unaware method (up to 44%) and a location-aware method (up to 17%). Further, through an intensive performance measurement using various input shaking methods, we substantiate that the proposed approach achieves a reliable and consistent performance.