CoopEdge: Cost-effective Server Deployment for Cooperative Multi-Access Edge Computing

The combination of 5G and edge computing has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to empower pervasive and intensive computing for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). High deployment cost is one of the major obstacles for realizing 5G edge computing. Most existing works tried to deploy the minimum number of edge servers to cover a target area by avoiding coverage overlaps. However, following this framework, the resource requirement per server will be drastically increased by the peak requirement during workload variations. Even worse, most resources will be left under-utilized for most of the time. To address this problem, we propose CoopEdge, a cost-effective server deployment scheme for cooperative multi-access edge computing. The key idea of CoopEdge is to allow deploying overlapped servers to handle variable requested workloads in a cooperative manner. In this way, the peak demands can be dispersed into multiple servers, and the resource requirement for each server could be greatly reduced. We further propose a two-step incremental algorithm, which jointly decides the server deployment and cooperation policies for fast convergence. We evaluate CoopEdge based on seven real-world edge applications. The results show that compared with the state-of-the-art works, CoopEdge significantly reduces the deployment cost by 38.7% and improves resource utilization by 36.2%.