Renting Edge Computing Resources for Service Hosting

Abstract: We consider the setting where a service is hosted on a third-party edge server deployed close to the users and a cloud server at a greater distance from the users. Due to the proximity of the edge servers to the users, requests can be served at the edge with low latency. However, as the computation resources at the edge are limited, some requests must be routed to the cloud for service and incur high latency. The system's overall performance depends on the rent cost incurred to use the edge server, the latency experienced by the users, and the cost incurred to change the amount of edge computation resources rented over time. The algorithmic challenge is to determine the amount of edge computation power to rent over time. We propose a deterministic online policy and characterize its performance for adversarial and stochastic i.i.d. request arrival processes. We also characterize a fundamental bound on the performance of any deterministic online policy. Further, we compare the performance of our policy with suitably modified versions of existing policies to conclude that our policy is robust to temporal changes in the intensity of request arrivals.