Energy-Delay Tradeoff for Virtual Machine Placement in Virtualized
Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Two-Sided Matching Approach
Abstract
By decoupling network functions from the underlying physical machines
(PMs) at the edge of the networks, the virtualized multi-access edge
computing (MEC) enables deployment of new network services and elastic
network scaling to reduce maintenance costs in a more flexible, scalable
and cost-effective manner. Although there are appealing performance
gains to be achieved, the placement of virtual machines (VMs) on top of
the sharing PMs to support computation-intensive applications for the
smart mobile devices becomes a major challenge, especially for an
increasing network scale. In this paper, we attempt to deal with the VM
placement problem in virtualized MEC system, which is targeted for
finding a performance balance between energy consumption and
computing/offloading delay. To capture such a tradeoff for VM placement,
we formulate a weighted sum based cost minimization problem as a pure
0-1 integer linear programming problem, which is NP-complete and very
complex to solve with lower complexity. Based on the one-to-one mapping
relation constraint, the VM placement problem is converted into a
many-to-many two-sided matching problem between the VM instances and the
PMs. Motivated by the student project allocation problem, we develop an
extended two-sided matching algorithm with lower computational
complexity for solving the many-to-many matching problem. Simulation
results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed
matching algorithm, and the normalization factor is of great
significance to obtain lower total cost.