Prioritized Fault Recovery Strategies for Multi-Access Edge Computing Using Probabilistic Model Checking

The advent of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) has enabled service providers to mitigate high network latencies often encountered in accessing cloud services by deploying containerized application instances on edge servers situated near end users. MEC servers are, however, susceptible to various types of failures such as communication link failures, hardware failures and so on. A fault recovery strategy determines which MEC servers to utilize to re-deploy application containers in the event of a failure. In this work, we propose a two-fold fault recovery strategy characterized by application priority. We propose a Formal Methods driven local recovery strategy for high-priority applications. We use Stochastic Multi-Player Games as a Formal Model to characterize the interactions between the different components in an MEC environment. We use objectives specified in Probabilistic Alternating-Time Temporal Logic with a Probabilistic Model Checker to derive recovery strategies considering all possible execution scenarios of the model. For lower priority applications, we resort to a global recovery strategy by designing a greedy heuristic considering each server’s failure probability. We use benchmark datasets to validate our approach. Experimental results show an average 14% reduction in latency with our approach in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods.