Enhancing Availability for the MEC Service: CVaR-based Computation Offloading

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables mobile users to offload their computation loads to nearby edge servers, and is seen to be integrated in the 5G architecture to support a variety of low-latency applications and services. However, an edge server might soon be overloaded when its computation resources are heavily requested, and would then fail to process all of its received computation loads in time. Unlike most of existing schemes that ingeniously instruct the overloaded edge server to transfer computation loads to the remote cloud, we make use of the spare computation resources from other local edge servers by specially taking the risk of network link failures into account. We measure such link failure risks with the financial risk management metric of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), and well constrain it to the offloading decisions using a Minimum Cost Flow (MCF) problem formulation. Numerical results validate the enhancement of the MEC service's availability by our risk-aware offloading scheme.