Minimizing active nodes in MEC environments: A distributed learning-driven framework for application placement

Application placement in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs), minimize energy consumption, and optimize metrics based on specific service requirements. In distributed MEC system environments, the placement problem also requires consideration of various ty...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Torres Pérez , Claudia, Coronado Calero, Estefanía, Cervelló Pastor , Cristina, Palomares , Javier, Carmona Cejudo, Estela, Shuaib Siddiqui , Muhammad
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Repositorio:RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM
OAI Identifier:oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/44803
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10578/44803
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Application placement
Distributed deep reinforcement learning
MEC
Scalability
Descripción
Sumario:Application placement in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs), minimize energy consumption, and optimize metrics based on specific service requirements. In distributed MEC system environments, the placement problem also requires consideration of various types of applications with different entry distribution rates and requirements, and the incorporation of varying numbers of hosts to enable the development of a scalable system. One possible way to achieve these objectives is to minimize the number of active nodes in order to avoid resource fragmentation and unnecessary energy consumption. This paper presents a Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Capacity-Aware Application Placement (DDRL-CAAP) approach aimed at reducing the number of active nodes in a multi-MEC system scenario that is managed by several orchestrators. Internet of Things (IoT) and Extended Reality (XR) applications are considered in order to evaluate close-to-real-world environments via simulation and on a real testbed. The proposed design is scalable for different numbers of nodes, MEC systems, and vertical applications. The performance results show that DDRL-CAAP achieves an average improvement of 98.3% in inference time compared with the benchmark Integer Linear Programming (ILP) algorithm, and a mean reduction of 4.35% in power consumption compared with a Random Selection (RS) algorithm.