SOAR: Smart Online Aggregated Reservation for Mobile Edge Computing Brokerage Services

With the development of MEC services, MEC brokers will emerge to facilitate the purchase and management of resources for individual MEC users. Both data communication and computing resources offered by MEC service providers can be purchased by pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or reserved plans. Besides data and computing plans for each type of resource, we also consider combo plans specifically designed for MEC services covering both resources. In this paper, we propose a smart online aggregated reservation (SOAR) framework for MEC brokers to minimize their cost of reserving resources for multiple users without the knowledge of future demands. In our framework, a task aggregation algorithm is designed to aggregate the users’ demands in each PAYG billing cycle to improve the plan utilization, and plan reservation algorithms are proposed to decide when to reserve which plans. The performance gap (competitive ratio) between SOAR and optimal solution which knows all future demands in advance, is analyzed and derived in closed-form. The performance gap is proved to be the minimum among all deterministic online algorithms. Trace-driven simulations verify the cost advantage of our SOAR framework, which can save nearly 40 percent of cost for users through the brokerage service.