A Hyper Heuristic Algorithm for Efficient Resource Allocation in 5G Mobile Edge Clouds

Emergence of intelligent devices and mobile edge clouds (MECs) in 5G networks has exponentially increased the number of applications that demand low latency services. However, their resource heterogeneity, limited computing power and storage including congestion in the ultra-dense 5G network, make the real-time services challenging. Existing works are limited either by addressing application delay requirements or computational load balancing. This article develops an efficient resource allocation framework for selecting optimal servers and routing paths in the 5G MEC network by jointly optimizing latency, computational, and network load variances. First, we formulate the above multi-objective problem as a mixed-integer non-linear programming problem. Further, we adopt a hyper-heuristic (AWSH) algorithm by leveraging the combined powers of Ant Colony, Whale, Sine-Cosine, and Henry Gas Solubility Optimization algorithms. The proposed AWSH algorithm works at the higher level, and it explores and exploits one of the three lower-level heuristics in each iteration to efficiently capture the dynamically varying environmental parameters and thereby address the resource allocation problem. Their collaborative effort helps to achieve a global optimum in allocating resources of 5G MEC network. Simulation results prove the superiority of the AWSH algorithm compared to state-of-the-art solutions in terms of service latency, successful offloading ratio, and load balancing.