Optimal Workload Allocation for Edge Computing Network Using Application Prediction

By deploying edge servers on the network edge, mobile edge computing network strengthens the real-time processing ability near the end devices and releases the huge load pressure of the core network. Considering the limited computing or storage resources on the edge server side, the workload allocation among edge servers for each Internet of Things (IoT) application affects the response time of the application’s requests. Hence, when the access devices of the edge server are deployed intensively, the workload allocation becomes a key factor affecting the quality of user experience (QoE). To solve this problem, this paper proposes an edge workload allocation scheme, which uses application prediction (AP) algorithm to minimize response delay. This problem has been proved to be a NP hard problem. First, in the application prediction model, long short-term memory (LSTM) method is proposed to predict the tasks of future access devices. Second, based on the prediction results, the edge workload allocation is divided into two subproblems to solve, which are the task assignment subproblem and the resource allocation subproblem. Using historical execution data, we can solve the problem in linear time. The simulation results show that the proposed AP algorithm can effectively reduce the response delay of the device and the average completion time of the task sequence and approach the theoretical optimal allocation results.