Service (business)

Computer network

Mathematics

Access network

Base station

Biology

Server

Forwarding plane

Algorithm

Mathematical optimization

Service provider

Network packet

Economy

Economics

Microeconomics

Profit (economics)

Ecology

Mobile edge computing

Energy consumption

Computer science

Quality of service

Particle swarm optimization

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

In a 5G network, mobile-edge computing (MEC) plays a key role in providing low access delay services. The placement of edge servers not only determines the quality of services on the user side but also affects the profit of running a MEC system. In this article, we study how to properly place edge servers so as to guarantee the access delay and maximize the profit of edge providers. We first propose a profit model which involves both access delay and energy consumption. In this model, we take the 5G user plane function (UPF) into consideration to calculate access delay for the first time. Then, we devise a particle swarm optimization-based algorithm to optimize the profit. In the algorithm, we introduce a weight value <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to guarantee the access delay and assign base stations properly. Moreover, a service-level agreement is adopted to balance the tradeoff between access delay and energy consumption. We take advantage of our 5G network emulator called mini5Gedge and data set from Shanghai Telecom to conduct massive experiments. The results show that our algorithm stands out in terms of achieving the highest profit.

Profit-Aware Edge Server Placement