An Edge-Storage-Aided Scheduling Method for Edge-Computing-Enabled Optical Metro Networks

Along with the rise of edge computing (EC), the cooperation of EC nodes becomes critical, which fuels a growing demand for inter-EC-node (inter-ECN) transfers. Typically, data are transferred in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. However, bulk data, tight transfer deadline and bandwidth fragmentation make such transfers extremely difficult. In this paper, we incorporate multi-path routing and storage on EC nodes into the data transfer, and present an edge-storage-aided multi-path scheduling method (ESMP) for inter-ECN transfers across the EC-enabled optical metro network. ESMP splits the data into chunks and schedules them across link-disjoint routing paths with the help of EC storage. Specifically, within the same deadline for the whole data, a chunk can tolerate longer storing delay and hence can be temporarily stored on an intermediate EC node when its next hop is busy. As a result, a routing path can be split into time-independent sub-paths when the E2E provisioning fails. This improves both the throughput and the flexibility of each transfer. Besides, ESMP can dynamically adapt multi-path routing to balance the completion time and the bandwidth usage based on the current network state. Studies show that compared with the existing scheduling methods, ESMP can accommodate more transfers while reducing the completion time.