• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.46-59
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• 2022

The 5G MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) technology offers network and computing functionalities that allow application services to improve in terms of network delay, bandwidth, and security, by locating the application servers closer to the users at the edge nodes within the 5G network. To offer its interoperability within various networks and user equipment, standardization of the 5G MEC technology has been advanced in ETSI, 3GPP, and ITU-T, primarily for the MEC platform, transport support, and MEC federation. This article offers a brief review of the standardization activities for 5G MEC technology and the details about the system architecture and functionalities developed accordingly.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.3043-3067
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• 2022

With the mobile traffic in the network increases exponentially, multi-access edge computing (MEC) develops rapidly. MEC servers are deployed geo-distribution, which serve many mobile terminals locally to improve users' QoE (Quality of Experience). When the cache space of a MEC server is full, how to replace the cached videos is an important problem. The problem is also called the cache replacement problem, which becomes more complex due to the dynamic video popularity and the varied video sizes. Therefore, we proposed a new cache replacement scheme based on local video popularity and video size to solve the cache replacement problem of MEC servers. First, we built a local video popularity model, which is composed of a popularity rise model and a popularity attenuation model. Furthermore, the popularity attenuation model incorporates a frequency-dependent attenuation model and a frequency-independent attenuation model. Second, we formulated a utility based on local video popularity and video size. Moreover, the weights of local video popularity and video size were quantitatively analyzed by using the information entropy. Finally, we conducted extensive simulation experiments based on the proposed scheme and some compared schemes. The simulation results showed that our proposed scheme performs better than the compared schemes in terms of hit rate, average delay, and server load under different network configurations.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.226-238
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• 2024

Recently, multi-access edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technology to alleviate the computing burden of vehicular terminals and efficiently facilitate vehicular applications. The vehicle can improve the quality of experience of applications by offloading their tasks to MEC servers. However, channel conditions are time-varying due to channel interference among vehicles, and path loss is time-varying due to the mobility of vehicles. The task arrival of vehicles is also stochastic. Therefore, it is difficult to determine an optimal offloading with resource allocation decision in the dynamic MEC system because offloading is affected by wireless data transmission. In this paper, we study computation offloading with resource allocation in the dynamic MEC system. The objective is to minimize power consumption and maximize throughput while meeting the delay constraints of tasks. Therefore, it allocates resources for local execution and transmission power for offloading. We define the problem as a Markov decision process, and propose an offloading method using deep reinforcement learning named deep deterministic policy gradient. Simulation shows that, compared with existing methods, the proposed method outperforms in terms of throughput and satisfaction of delay constraints.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.11-19
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• 2021

The emerging Fifth Generation (5G) network technology brings us a new demand for low latency services. However, it may not be possible for long-distanced cloud computing servers to support users with satisfactory low latency services. For this reason, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technology are gaining attraction since it is designed to provide low latency services to users by placing cloud computing resources to base-stations or mobile switching centers nearby users. Accordingly, it is necessary to verify the deployed containers on the MECs are reliable enough to provide low latency services empirically. For the purpose, we develop a testing tool to verify the reliability as well as network resources status of running MECs by deploying containers on the MECs in a Kubernetes environment.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.139-146
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• 2022

With the recent development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the convergence of vehicles and IT technologies, high-performance applications such as autonomous driving are emerging, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) has attracted lots of attentions as next-generation technologies. In order to provide service to these computation-intensive tasks in low latency, many methods have been proposed to partition tasks so that they can be performed through cooperation of multiple MEC servers(MECSs). Conventional methods related to task partitioning have proposed methods for partitioning tasks on vehicles as mobile devices and offloading them to multiple MECSs, and methods for offloading them from vehicles to MECSs and then partitioning and migrating them to other MECSs. In this paper, the performance of task partitioning methods using offloading and migration is compared and analyzed in terms of service delay, blocking rate and energy consumption according to the method of selecting partitioning targets and the number of partitioning. As the number of partitioning increases, the performance of the service delay improves, but the performance of the blocking rate and energy consumption decreases.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.489-504
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• 2021

By distributing computing tasks among devices at the edge of networks, edge computing uses virtualization, distributed computing and parallel computing technologies to enable users dynamically obtain computing power, storage space and other services as needed. Applying edge computing architectures to Internet of Vehicles can effectively alleviate the contradiction among the large amount of computing, low delayed vehicle applications, and the limited and uneven resource distribution of vehicles. In this paper, a predictive offloading strategy based on the MEC load state is proposed, which not only considers reducing the delay of calculation results by the RSU multi-hop backhaul, but also reduces the queuing time of tasks at MEC servers. Firstly, the delay factor and the energy consumption factor are introduced according to the characteristics of tasks, and the cost of local execution and offloading to MEC servers for execution are defined. Then, from the perspective of vehicles, the delay preference factor and the energy consumption preference factor are introduced to define the cost of executing a computing task for another computing task. Furthermore, a mathematical optimization model for minimizing the power overhead is constructed with the constraints of time delay and power consumption. Additionally, the simulated annealing algorithm is utilized to solve the optimization model. The simulation results show that this strategy can effectively reduce the system power consumption by shortening the task execution delay. Finally, we can choose whether to offload computing tasks to MEC server for execution according to the size of two costs. This strategy not only meets the requirements of time delay and energy consumption, but also ensures the lowest cost.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.10 no.12
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• pp.311-318
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• 2021

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things(IoT) technology recently, multi-access edge computing(MEC) is emerged as a next-generation technology for real-time and high-performance services. High mobility of users between MECs with limited service areas is considered one of the issues in the MEC environment. In this paper, we consider a vehicle edge computing(VEC) environment which has a high mobility, and propose a task migration algorithm to decide whether or not to migrate and where to migrate using DQN, as a reinforcement learning method. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to improve the system throughput while satisfying QoS(Quality of Service) requirements by minimizing the difference between queueing delays in vehicle edge computing servers(VECSs). The results show that compared to other algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves approximately 14-49% better QoS satisfaction and approximately 14-38% lower service blocking rate.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.114-116
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• 2022

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.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.615-629
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• 2021

With the development of mobile edge computing, how to utilize the computing power of edge computing to effectively and efficiently offload data and to compute offloading is of great research value. This paper studies the computation offloading problem of multi-user and multi-server in mobile edge computing. Firstly, in order to minimize system energy consumption, the problem is modeled by considering the joint optimization of the offloading strategy and the wireless and computing resource allocation in a multi-user and multi-server scenario. Additionally, this paper explores the computation offloading scheme to optimize the overall cost. As the centralized optimization method is an NP problem, the game method is used to achieve effective computation offloading in a distributed manner. The decision problem of distributed computation offloading between the mobile equipment is modeled as a multi-user computation offloading game. There is a Nash equilibrium in this game, and it can be achieved by a limited number of iterations. Then, we propose a distributed computation offloading algorithm, which first calculates offloading weights, and then distributedly iterates by the time slot to update the computation offloading decision. Finally, the algorithm is verified by simulation experiments. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve the balance by a limited number of iterations. At the same time, the algorithm outperforms several other advanced computation offloading algorithms in terms of the number of users and overall overheads for beneficial decision-making.