Efficient Service Entity Chain Placement in Mobile Edge Computing

Edge service entity placement is a fundamental issue in mobile edge computing, which tries to place service entities on edge servers to achieve better economic benefits and quality of service for users. Most existing studies towards this issue usually deploy application services separately; however, we observe that many application services can be broken down into smaller service components/entities, which may enable us to share these smaller entities between application services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the concept of service entity chain, which is a chain of ordered service entities that represent an application service. We study the problem of placing service entities in the form of chains on edge servers within a given cost budget, so as to minimize the total latency experienced by users. We provide a formal problem formulation and design an efficient algorithm for it. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm compared with two state-of-the-art algorithms.