Availability-Aware Revenue-Effective Application Deployment in Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising computing paradigm to push computing resources and services to the network edge. It allows applications/services to be deployed on edge servers for provisioning low-latency services to nearby users. However, in the MEC environment, edge servers may suffer from failures while the app vendor has to guarantee continuously available services to its users, thereby securing its revenue for application instances deployed. In this paper, we focus on available service provisioning when cost-effectively deploying application instances on edge servers. We first formulate a novel Availability-aware Revenue-effective Application Deployment (ARAD) problem in the MEC environment with the aim to maximize the overall revenue by considering both service availability benefit and deployment cost. We prove that the ARAD problem is NP-hard. Then, we propose an approximation algorithm named ARAD-A to find the ARAD solution efficiently with a constant approximation ratio of 1/2. We extensively evaluate the performance of ARAD-A against five representative approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that our ARAD-A can achieve the best performance in securing the app vendor's overall revenue.