Joint Heterogeneous Server Placement and Application Configuration in Edge Computing

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought profound changes in the cloud computing paradigm. One promising computing model in IoT-related applications is edge computing, which can decrease the request response time by deploying edge servers close to IoT devices. Two fundamental problems in edge computing include how to place a limited number of edge servers on the candidate locations (e.g., the Access Points) and how to configure the applications on each server. In this paper, we jointly study the edge server placement and the application configuration to minimize the weighted sum of the service cost and edge server opening cost. We propose a local-search based algorithm, named SPAC, to solve the problem efficiently with its approximation ratio analyzed. Extensive simulations on Google data traces demonstrate SPAC reduces the total cost by up to 60% compared with state-of-the-art methods, and outperforms the baselines consistently in different parameter settings.