Supporting Location Transparent Services in a Mobile Edge Computing Environment

Abstract

Emerging models such as mobile edge computing provide the necessary characteristics for the deployment of Internet of Things applications by supplying the connected devices with local computing facilities essential for latency sensitive applications. One of the major issues of the underlying edge computing architecture is to cope with the device mobility that imposes dynamically changing network requirements. In this paper, we propose a resource management approach that aims to improve the location transparency and provide high quality of experience for end users by optimising latencies perceived when nodes are accessing services hosted on the edge of the network. By managing the virtualised computing resources based on the node location area information, the main objective of the approach is to minimise the network latency perceived by mobile nodes for both the initial allocation and the dynamic resource migration during the service lifetime while the requester node is changing location areas. The system is trying to achieve the most accurate 'follow me' service where the assigned resources closely follow the current mobile node location. The presented results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution in comparison to traditional resource management techniques on the macro and micro scale.

Keywords

• context-aware services
• handover
• mobile nodes
• resource management
• wireless networks