Interference-Aware Online Multicomponent Service Placement in Edge Cloud Networks and its AI Application

Edge computing that utilizes ubiquitous edge devices locating in close proximity to users is powerful for providing Quality of Service guaranteed computation offloading services. Toward the limited resources of edge servers and wireless links, large services can be split into multiple interconnected components to be served by multiple edge servers cooperatively. The current works on service placement either assume unsplittable services or ignore the geographically isolated property of edge servers. They also ignore the interference among online services that share the same physical nodes/links in terms of executing delay. Namely, every service adds load to the placed nodes/links and every increment on load of nodes/links risks delay violation of existing services. To overcome above challenges, this article emphasizes on the interference-aware (IA) online multicomponent service placement in edge cloud networks. First, the delay of tree-like services is analyzed considering the dependency among components, based on which the IA residual capacities of physical nodes, links, and paths are defined and formulated theoretically. Furthermore, we reduce the problem of multicomponent service placement to be NP-hard and transform it into an ant colony optimization (ACO) problem to obtain the near-optimal solution. More importantly, a level traversal component ranking method and an IA dynamic pruning method are proposed for ACO to achieve faster convergence, interference awareness, and higher acceptance ratio of services. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of proposed methods. In addition, the classic artificial intelligence application of image classification is experimented to further strength the motivation of IA investigation in practical.