Surfing the SWAVES: Lifecycle-aware Service Placement in MEC

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Giarrè, Federico, Karl, Holger
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Giarrè, Federico
Karl, Holger
author_facet Giarrè, Federico
Karl, Holger
contents In Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) networks, users covered by a mobile network can exploit edge clouds (ECs), computational resources located at the network's edge, to execute virtual network functions (VNFs). ECs are particularly useful when deploying VNFs with strict delay and availability requirements. As users roam in the network and get handed over between cells, deployed VNFs must follow users to retain the benefits of edge computing. Yet, having VNFs ready at the closest EC can be challenging: (i) ECs are not usually powerful enough to store and run any combination of VNFs simultaneously; (ii) if a VNF is not available at the needed EC, a series of time-consuming operations has to be performed before the VNF becomes operational. These limitations can be addressed by proactively starting VNFs instances at (likely) future locations, balancing better latency properties against higher resource usage. Such proactive deployment does need forecasting of user movements, but these will be imperfect, creating yet another tradeoff. We present our approach to this service provisioning problem, SWAVES. When compared on the ratio of users' unsuccessful packets, SWAVES improves such metric by orders of magnitude with respect to other proposed heuristic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Surfing the SWAVES: Lifecycle-aware Service Placement in MEC
Giarrè, Federico
Karl, Holger
Networking and Internet Architecture
In Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) networks, users covered by a mobile network can exploit edge clouds (ECs), computational resources located at the network's edge, to execute virtual network functions (VNFs). ECs are particularly useful when deploying VNFs with strict delay and availability requirements. As users roam in the network and get handed over between cells, deployed VNFs must follow users to retain the benefits of edge computing. Yet, having VNFs ready at the closest EC can be challenging: (i) ECs are not usually powerful enough to store and run any combination of VNFs simultaneously; (ii) if a VNF is not available at the needed EC, a series of time-consuming operations has to be performed before the VNF becomes operational. These limitations can be addressed by proactively starting VNFs instances at (likely) future locations, balancing better latency properties against higher resource usage. Such proactive deployment does need forecasting of user movements, but these will be imperfect, creating yet another tradeoff. We present our approach to this service provisioning problem, SWAVES. When compared on the ratio of users' unsuccessful packets, SWAVES improves such metric by orders of magnitude with respect to other proposed heuristic.
title Surfing the SWAVES: Lifecycle-aware Service Placement in MEC
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12265