Towards responsive user services in edge computing

Abstract

Mobile applications can improve battery and application performance by offloading heavy processing tasks to more powerful compute servers. Cloud servers are located far from mobile devices that may not meet the responsiveness requirements of those applications. Edge servers deployed at the edge of the network to provide the compute resources to achieve low latency. So the combination of 5G and edge computing has the potential to offer low latency user services that can make the mobile applications responsive. 5G provides fast communication between users and servers, however, additional communication delays can occur because of increasing number of roundtrip communication to locate the servers using domain name system (DNS). So, I propose a caching mechanism to reduce the DNS roundtrip delay. Furthermore, the edge server and cellular tower use the same compute resources, which are limited. It is not clear how to place the tasks on the limited edge resources and how to handle the resource sharing when Radio Access Network (RAN) process needs more computation resources to handle network traffic fluctuations. So, I present several techniques to implement task checkpointing, task checkpointing overhead prediction, and task migration to provide low latency and responsive services to mobile applications. I also show how the proposed techniques can manage the shared resources between mobile network and edge servers, utilize the available edge resource effectively and increase users' quality of experience.