DRL based Dynamic Service Mobility for Marginal Downtime in Multi-access Edge Computing

The advent of the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm allows mobile users to offload resource-intensive and delay-stringent services to nearby servers, thereby significantly enhancing the quality of experience. Due to erratic roaming of mobile users in the network environment, maintaining maximum quality of experience becomes challenging as they move farther away from the serving edge server, particularly due to the increased latency resulting from the extended distance. The services could be migrated, under policies obtained using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques, to an optimal edge server, however, this operation incurs significant costs in terms of service downtime, thereby adversely affecting service quality of experience. Thus, this study addresses the service mobility problem of deciding whether to migrate and where to migrate the service instance for maximized migration benefits and marginal service downtime.