Novel Workload-Aware Approach to Mobile User Reallocation in Crowded Mobile Edge Computing Environment

A mobile edge computing (MEC) paradgim is evolving as an increasingly popular means for developing and deploying smart-city-oriented applications. MEC servers can receive a great deal of requests from devices of mobile users, especially in crowded scenes, e.g., a city's central business district and school areas. It thus remains a great challenge for appropriate scheduling and managing strategies to avoid hotspots, guarantee load-fairness among MEC servers, and maintain high resource utilization at the same time. To address this challenge, we propose a coalitional-game-based and location-aware approach to MEC service migration for mobile user reallocation in crowded scenes. Our proposed method includes: 1) dividing MEC servers into multiple coalitions according to their inter-Euclidean distance by using a modified k-means clustering method; 2) discovering hotspots in every coalition area and scheduling services based on their corresponding cooperations; and 3) migrating services to appropriate edge servers to achieve high utilization and load-fairness among coalition members. Experimental results based on a real-world mobile trajectory dataset for crowded scenes, and an urban-edge-server-position dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of load fairness, number of migrations, and utilization rate of edge servers.