Robust Access Point Clustering in Edge Computing Resource Optimization

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 2738 - 2750
• Main Authors: Yellas, Nour-El-Houda, Boumerdassi, Selma, Ceselli, Alberto, Maaz, Bilal, Secci, Stefano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; access point clustering; Algorithms; Cloud computing; Clustering; Clustering algorithms; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Computer Science; Edge computing; MEC resource allocation; Mobile computing; Multi-access edge computing; Networking and Internet Architecture; Optimization; Provisioning; RAN virtualization; Robustness; Task analysis; Virtualization; Access Point Clustering; RAN virtualization; Multi-access Edge Computing; MEC Resource Allocation
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2022.3186856
• ISSN: 1932-4537

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technology has emerged to overcome traditional cloud computing limitations, challenged by the new 5G services with heavy and heterogeneous requirements on both latency and bandwidth. In this work, we tackle the problem of clustering access points in MEC environments, introducing a set of clustering models to be deployed at the pre-provisioning phase. We go through extensive simulations on real-world traffic demands to evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions. In addition, we show how MEC hosts capacity violation can be decreased when integrating access points clustering into the orchestration model, by investigating on solution accuracy when applied on held-out users traffic demands. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms two state-of-the-art algorithms, reducing both memory usage and execution time, by 46% and 50%, respectively, in comparison to a baseline algorithm. It surpasses the two methods in gaining control over MEC hosts capacity usage for different maximum achieved occupancy levels on MEC hosts.