Mobile Edge Computing Performance Evaluation using Stochastic Petri Nets

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a network architecture that takes advantage of cloud computing features (such as high availability and elasticity) and makes use of computational resources available at the edge of the network in order to enhance the mobile user experience by decreasing the service latency. MEC solutions need to dynamically allocate the requests as close as possible to their users. However, the request placement depends not only on the geographical location of the servers, but also on their requirements. Based on this fact, this paper proposes a stochastic Petri net (SPN) model to represent an MEC scenario and analyse its performance, focusing on the parameters that can directly impact the service mean response time (MRT) and resource utilisation level. In order to present the applicability of our work, we propose three case studies with numerical analysis using real-world values. The main objective is to provide a practical guide to help infrastructure administrators to adapt their architectures, finding a trade-off between MRT and level of resource usage.

Cybercrime is significantly growing as the development of internet technology. To mitigate this issue, the law enforcement adopts network surveillance technology to track a suspect and derive the online profile. However, the traditional network surveillance using the single-device tracking method can only acquire part of a suspect’s online activities. With the emergence of different types of devices (e.g., personal computers, mobile phones, and smart wearable devices) in the mobile edge computing (MEC) environment, one suspect can employ multiple devices to launch a cybercrime. In this paper, we investigate a novel cross-device tracking approach which is able to correlate one suspect’s different devices so as to help the law enforcement monitor a suspect’s online activities more comprehensively. Our approach is based on the network traffic analysis of instant messaging (IM) applications, which are typical commercial service providers (CSPs) in the MEC environment. We notice a new habit of using IM applications, that is, one individual logs in the same account on multiple devices. This habit brings about devices’ receiving sync messages, which can be utilized to correlate devices. We choose five popular apps (i.e., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, and Skype) to prove our approach’s effectiveness. The experimental results show that our approach can identify IM messages with high F1-scores (e.g., QQ’s PC message is 0.966, and QQ’s phone message is 0.924) and achieve an average correlating accuracy of 89.58% of five apps in an 8-people experiment, with the fastest correlation speed achieved in 100 s.

As a key technology in the 5G era, mobile edge computing (MEC) has developed rapidly in recent years. MEC aims to reduce the service delay of mobile users, while alleviating the processing pressure on the core network. MEC can be regarded as an extension of cloud computing on the user side, which can deploy edge servers and bring computing resources closer to mobile users, and provide more efficient interactions. However, due to the user's dynamic mobility, the distance between the user and the edge server will change dynamically, which may cause fluctuations in Quality of Service. Therefore, when a mobile user moves in the MEC environment, certain approaches are needed to schedule services deployed on the edge server to ensure the user experience. In this article, we model service scheduling in MEC scenarios and propose a delay‐aware and mobility‐aware service management approach based on concise probabilistic methods. This approach has low computational complexity and can effectively reduce service delay and migration costs. Furthermore, we conduct experiments by utilizing multiple realistic datasets and use iFogSim to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. The results show that our proposed approach can optimize the performance on service delay, with 8%–20% improvement and reduce the migration cost by more than 75% compared with baselines during the rush hours.

In the mobile edge computing (MEC) environment, the edge caching can provide the timely data response service for the intelligent scenarios. However, due to the limited storage capacity of edge nodes and the malicious node behavior, the question of how to select the cached contents and realize the decentralized security data caching faces challenges. In this paper, a blockchain-based decentralized and proactive caching strategy is proposed in an MEC environment to address this problem. The novelty is that the blockchain was adopted in an MEC environment with a proactive caching strategy based on node utility, and the corresponding optimization problem was built. The blockchain was adopted to build a secure and reliable service environment. The employed methodology is that the optimal caching strategy was achieved based on the linear relaxation technology and the interior point method. Additionally, in a content caching system, there is a trade-off between cache space and node utility, and the caching strategy was proposed to solve this problem. There was also a trade-off between the consensus process delay of blockchain and the caching latency of content. An offline consensus authentication method was adopted to reduce the influence of the consensus process delay on the content caching. The key finding was that the proposed algorithm can reduce latency and can ensure the security data caching in an IoT environment. Finally, the simulation experiment showed that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 49.32%, 43.11%, and 34.85% improvements on the cache hit rate, the average content response latency, and the average system utility, respectively, compared to the random content caching algorithm, and it achieved up to 9.67%, 8.11%, and 5.95% increases, successively, compared to the greedy content caching algorithm.

With the rapid deployment of edge base stations and the widespread application of 5G technology, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)has gradually transitioned from a theoretical concept to practical implementation, playing a key role in emerging human-machine interactions and innovative mobile applications. In the MEC environment, efficiently allocating services, effectively utilizing edge device resources, and ensuring timely service responses have become critical research topics. Existing studies often treat MEC service allocation as an offline strategy, where the real-time location of users is used as input, and static optimization is applied. However, this approach overlooks dynamic factors such as user mobility. To address this limitation, this paper constructs a model based on constraints, optimization objectives, and server connection methods, determines experimental parameters and evaluation metrics, and sets up an experimental framework. We propose an Edge Location Prediction Model (ELPM) suitable for the MEC scenario, which integrates Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks and attention mechanisms. By leveraging attention parameters, ELPM acquires spatio-temporal adaptive weights, enabling accurate location predictions. We also design an improved service allocation strategy, MESDA, based on the Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm. MESDA dynamically adjusts its exploration and exploitation components, and introduces a random factor to enhance the algorithm's ability to determine the direction during later stages. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we conduct multiple controlled experiments focusing on both location prediction models and service allocation algorithms. The results show that, compared to the baseline methods, our approach achieves improvements of 2.56%, 5.29%, and 2.16% in terms of the average user connection to edge servers, average service deployment cost, and average service allocation execution time, respectively, demonstrating the superiority and feasibility of the proposed methods.

The rapid advancement of mobile edge computing (MEC) has led to a growing need for executing complex in‐vehicle applications at the endpoint. These applications are often modeled as workflows with clearly defined task dependencies. In MEC environments, computation offloading plays a crucial role in enhancing Quality of Service (QoS). Nevertheless, most existing offloading strategies primarily address independent tasks, paying little attention to the intricate dependencies among tasks. Moreover, key factors such as budgets and privacy protection are not well tackled. Hence, in this paper, we propose a computation offloading model for workflow applications in mobile edge computing, where the makespan is optimized under budget and privacy constraints. To address it, we introduce an intelligent scheduling method, which consists of task offloading and resource preparation stages, and offloads tasks from the end to the edge and clouds with awareness of task urgency, device computing capabilities, economic costs, and privacy protection. Simulation experiments are conducted based on realistic datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve task execution efficiency and ensure data security, thereby enhancing the performance of workflow applications in mobile edge computing scenarios.

A pipeline approach for privacy preservation against poisoning attacks in a Mobile Edge Computing environment

We propose a data-driven distributed machine learning approach to scalably predict the trustworthiness of homogeneous IoT services in heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based IoT systems. The proposed approach formulates training distributed trust prediction models within an MEC-based IoT system as a Network Lasso problem. We then introduce a variant of Stochastic Alternating Method of Multipliers framework (S-ADMM) enriched with the ability for feature selection at each MEC layer. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation on three real-world datasets adjusted to exhibit the context-dependent trust information accumulated in MEC environments within a given MEC topology. The experimental results affirmed the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability to predict trustworthiness of IoT services in MEC-based IoT systems.

As a new paradigm of distributed computing, mobile edge computing (MEC) has gained increasing attention due to its ability to expand the capabilities of centralized cloud computing. In MEC environments, a software application typically consists of multiple micro‐services, which can be composed together in a flexible manner to achieve various user requests. However, the composition of micro‐services in MEC is still a challenging research issue arising from three aspects. Firstly, composite micro‐services constructed by ignoring the processing capabilities of different micro‐services may cause waste of edge resources. Secondly, edge servers' limitations in terms of computational power can easily cause service occupancy between composite micro‐services, severely affecting the user experience. Thirdly, in dynamic and unstable mobile environments, different edge users have different sensitivities to request latency, which increases the complexity of micro‐service composition. In order to improve edge resource utilization and user experience on micro‐service invocations, in this paper, we comprehensively consider the above three factors, and we first model the micro‐services composition problem in MEC as a constrained multi‐objective optimization problem. Then, a micro‐service composition optimization method M3C combining graph search and branch‐and‐bound strategy is proposed to find a composition solution set with low energy consumption and high success rate for multiple edge users. Finally, we perform a series of experiments on two widely used datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the four competing baseline approaches, and that it is sufficiently efficient for practical deployment.

Computationally intensive and latency sensitive applications put forward strict requirements on mobile user equipments (UEs) to provide the required computation capacity and delay. Mobile edge computing (MEC) in ultra-dense network (UDN) is considered as a promising solution that can reduce the computation limitations of UEs and extend their battery life by computation offloading. But the dense deployment of UEs, and the limited resources of small cell base stations (SBSs), which imposes more delays on computation offloading in MEC environment. In this paper, using the characteristics of UDN, we study the computation offloading management scheme based on the weighted sum of task completion time and energy consumption in MEC system. Then, we propose a computation offloading framework and formulate joint task offloading and resource allocation problem in UDNs to minimize overall cost consumption. Based on Genetic algorithm (GA) and Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), we adopt a heuristic algorithm named as GAWOA to solve this problem. Numerical results show that the algorithm has a fast convergence speed and better performance than other benchmark algorithms.

Introduction: Data traffic in multiplayer games consists of realtime exchanges of commands between servers and players’ devices, which demand an immediate response. As the data volume increases, the system becomes overloaded, resulting in high latency and packet loss. Objective: This work proposes a new Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) model to evaluate the performance of this traffic in Fog–Cloud architectures designed for large-scale multiplayer games. Methodology: We built a SPN model and validated a simplified version; the model computes utilization, mean response time, drop probability, and throughput, allowing us to analyze the impact of different capacity configurations and load-distribution strategies. Results: The results reveal a direct relationship among processing capacity, load balancing, and quality of service: increasing the number of cloud GPUs reduces latency and packet loss while boosting throughput.

Adaptive computation offloading and resource allocation strategy in a mobile edge computing environment

With the growing prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technology, a burgeoning computing paradigm namely mobile edge computing (MEC) is delicately proposed and designed to accommodate the application requirements of IoT scenario. In this paper, we focus on the problems of dynamic task scheduling and resource management in MEC environment, with the specific objective of achieving the optimal revenue earned by edge service providers. While the majority of task scheduling and resource management algorithms are formulated by an integer programming (IP) problem and solved in a dispreferred NP-hard manner, we innovatively investigate the problem structure and identify a favorable property namely totally unimodular constraints. The totally unimodular property further helps to design an equivalent linear programming (LP) problem which can be efficiently and elegantly solved at polynomial computational complexity. In order to evaluate our proposed approach, we conduct simulations based on real-life IoT dataset to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) can improve the accuracy of local models and provide enhanced edge intelligence without exposing the raw data in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). However, in the MEC environment with constrained communication resources, transmitting the entire model between the server and the clients in traditional pFL methods imposes substantial communication overhead, which can lead to inaccurate personalization and degraded performance of mobile clients. In response, we propose a Communication-Efficient pFL architecture to enhance the performance of personalized models while minimizing communication overhead in MEC. First, a Knowledge-Aware Parameter Coaching method (KAPC) is presented to produce a more accurate personalized model by utilizing the layer-wise parameters of other clients with adaptive aggregation weights. Then, convergence analysis of the proposed KAPC is developed in both the convex and non-convex settings. Second, a Bidirectional Layer Selection algorithm (BLS) based on self-relationship and generalization error is proposed to select the most informative layers for transmission, which reduces communication costs. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed KAPC achieves superior accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines, while the proposed BLS substantially improves resource utilization without sacrificing performance.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a new distributed computing paradigm that overcomes the inability of cloud computing to offer low end-to-end latency. In a MEC environment, app vendors can deliver lower-latency services to mobile app users by placing applications on edge servers in close proximity to app users. From an app vendor's perspective, an optimal edge application placement strategy under a budget ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) constraint aims to place application instances on <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> edge servers within a specific area to maximize user coverage. However, edge servers may be subject to failure due to multiple reasons, e.g., hardware faults, software exceptions, cyber-attacks, etc. App users served by failed edge servers need to access applications from remote cloud servers if they cannot access any other edge servers. This impacts app users’ quality of experience significantly. Thus, app vendors need to consider the reliability of the edge server network when choosing edge servers for placing their application instances. We make the first attempt in this paper to tackle this problem of joint optimization of coverage and reliability for edge application placement (EAP-CR). We formulate this problem as a constrained optimization problem and prove its <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {NP}$</tex-math></inline-formula> -hardness theoretically. Then, we propose an optimal approach to find the optimal solutions with the integer programming technique, an approximation approach is also proposed to find approximate solutions for large-scale EAP-CR problems. We evaluate EAP- <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$OPT$</tex-math></inline-formula> and EAP- <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$APX$</tex-math></inline-formula> against three relevant approaches through experiments conducted on a widely-used real-world data set and a synthetic data set. The results demonstrate that our proposed approaches can solve the EAP-CR problem effectively and efficiently.