Search

The Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm gives impetus to the vigorous advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), through provisioning low-latency computing services at network edges. The emerging digital twin technique has been explosively growing in the IoT community, which bridges the gap between physical objects and their digital representations in an MEC network, enabling real-time monitoring and analysis, simulations on the dynamics of systems, accurate predictions on behaviours of objects, and optimization on network resource allocation. In this paper, we consider AoI-aware query services in an MEC network empowered by digital twin technology for diverse IoT applications. We aim to maximize the weighted sum of the accumulative freshness of query results measured by the Age of Information (AoI) and the total query service delay of admitted requests. To this end, we first formulate a novel minimization problem that explores nontrivial trade-offs between the two conflicting optimization objectives: the freshness of query results and service delays, and we show the NP-hardness of the problem. Then, we propose an approximation algorithm with a provable approximation ratio for the problem, at the expense of bounded computing capacity violations. We also develop a heuristic for the problem without any capacity violations. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms via simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising, and outperform the comparison benchmarks. IEEE

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been identified as a desirable computing paradigm that provides efficient and effective services for various applications, while meeting stringent service delay requirements. Orthogonal to the MEC computing paradigm, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology is another enabling technology that provides the network resource management with great flexibility and scalability, where the instances of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are deployed in edge servers as Service Function Chains (SFCs) for SFC-enabled services. Although reliable service provisioning in MEC environments is fundamentally important, the deployed VNF instances usually are not reliable, which can be affected by their software implementation, their execution duration, the workload among edge servers, and so on. Empowered by digital twin techniques, the states of VNF instances can be maintained by their digital twins in a real-time manner and their reliability can be accurately predicted through their digital twins. In this paper, we study digital twin-assisted, SFC-enabled reliable service provisioning in MEC networks by exploiting the dynamics of VNF instance reliability. We concentrate on two novel optimization problems of reliable service provisioning: the service cost minimization problem, and the dynamic service admission maximization problem. We first show their NP-hardness. We then formulate an Integer Linear Program (ILP) solution, and devise an approximation algorithm with a constant approximation ratio for the service cost minimization problem. We thirdly provide an ILP solution to the offline version of the dynamic service admission maximization problem. Built upon this offline ILP solution, we also develop an online algorithm with a provable competitive ratio for the problem, by adopting the primal-dual dynamic updating technique. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms via simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the pr