Edge Federation: Towards an Integrated Service Provisioning Model

Edge computing is a promising computing paradigm by pushing the cloud service to the network edge. To this end, edge infrastructure providers (EIPs) need to bring computation and storage resources to the network edge and allow edge service providers (ESPs) to provision latency-critical services for end users. Currently, EIPs prefer to establish a series of private edge-computing environments to serve specific requirements of users. This kind of resource provisioning mechanism severely limits the development and spread of edge computing in serving diverse user requirements. In this paper, we propose an integrated resource provisioning model, named edge federation, to seamlessly realize the resource cooperation and service provisioning across standalone edge computing providers and clouds. To efficiently schedule and utilize the resources across multiple EIPs, we systematically characterize the provisioning process as a large-scale linear programming (LP) problem and transform it into an easily solved form. Accordingly, we design a dynamic algorithm to tackle the varying service demands from users. We conduct extensive experiments over the base station networks in Toronto. Compared with the fixed contract model and multihoming model, edge federation can reduce the overall costs of EIPs by 23.3% to 24.5%, and 15.5% to 16.3%, respectively.