How Beneficial Are Intermediate Layer Data Centers in Mobile Edge Networks?

To reduce the congestion due to the future bandwidth-hungry applications in domains such as Health care, Internet of Things (IoT), etc., we study the benefit of introducing additional Data Centers (DCs) closer to the network edge for the optimal application placement. Our study shows that the edge layer DCs in a Mobile Edge Network (MEN) infrastructure is cost beneficial for the bandwidth-hungry applications having their strong demand locality and in the scenarios where large capacity is deployed at the edge layer DCs. The cost savings for such applications can go up to 67%. Additional intermediate layer DCs close to the root DC can be marginally cost beneficial for the compute intensive applications with medium or low demand locality. Hence, a Telecom Network Operator should start building an edge DC first having capacity up to hundreds of servers at the network edge to cater the emerging bandwidth-hungry applications and to minimize its operational cost.