Dynamic Migration Strategy for Mobile Multi-Access Edge Computing Services

The concept of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) has emerged to support the future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). As an enabling technology for the IoV, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) provides cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the radio access network and supports vehicular task offloading of low-latency services. However, vehicles move across radio cells and, computing services offloaded to the Mobile Edge Hosts (MEH)s might be interrupted. The key to ensuring service continuity is to preemptively anticipate the service migration process to a well-identified subset of available MEHs, at the optimal time. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm that combines the exponential-weight algorithm for exploration and exploitation (EXP3) and the Lyapunov optimization to jointly and proactively decide when to trigger migration and where to migrate the service before the handover. Our algorithm leads to significant cost saving while meeting any given risk and availability targets which are new metrics introduced to assess service continuity.