Edge computing in the Internet of Things brings applications and content closer to the users by introducing an additional computational layer at the network infrastructure, between cloud and the resource-constrained data producing devices and user equipment. This way, the opportunistic nature of the operational environment is addressed by introducing computational power in location with low latency and high bandwidth. However, location-aware deployment of edge computing infrastructure requires careful placement scheme for edge servers. To provide the best possible Quality of Service for the user applications, their proximity needs to be optimized. Moreover, the deployment faces practical limitations in budget limitations, hardware requirements of servers and in online load balancing between servers. To address these challenges, we formulate the edge server placement as a capacitated location-allocation problem, while minimizing the distance between servers and access points of a real city-wide Wi-Fi network deployment. In our algorithm, we utilize both upper and lower server capacity constraints for load balancing. Furthermore, we enable sharing of workload between servers to facilitate deployments with low capacity servers. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated in placement scenarios, exemplified by high capacity servers for edge computing and low capacity servers for Fog computing, with different parameters in a real-world data set. The data set consists of both dense deployment of access points in central areas, but also sparse deployment in suburban areas within the same network infrastructure. In comparison, we show that previous approaches do not sufficiently address such deployment. The presented algorithm is able to provide optimal placements that minimize the distances and provide balanced workload with sharing by following the capacity constraints.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging technology that aims at pushing applications and content close to the users (e.g., at base stations, access points, and aggregation networks) to reduce latency, improve quality of experience, and ensure highly efficient network operation and service delivery. It principally relies on virtualization-enabled MEC servers with limited capacity at the edge of the network. One key issue is to dimension such systems in terms of server size, server number, and server operation area to meet MEC goals. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a mixed integer linear program. We then propose a graph-based algorithm that, taking into account a maximum MEC server capacity, provides a partition of MEC clusters, which consolidates as many communications as possible at the edge. We use a dataset of mobile communications to extensively evaluate them with real world spatio-temporal human dynamics. In addition to quantifying macroscopic MEC benefits, the evaluation shows that our algorithm provides MEC area partitions that largely offload the core, thus pushing the load at the edge (e.g., with 10 small MEC servers between 55 and 64 of the traffic stay at the edge), and that are well balanced through time.  In this article, we propose content-centric, in-network content caching and placement approaches that leverage cooperation among edge cloud devices, content popularity, and GPS trajectory information to improve content delivery speeds, network traffic congestion, cache resource utilization efficiency, and users' quality of experience in highly populated cities. More specifically, our proposed approaches exploit collaborative filtering theory to provide accurate and efficient content popularity predictions to enable proactive in-network caching of Internet content. We propose a practical content delivery architecture that consists of standalone edge cloud devices to be deployed in the city to cache and process popular Internet content as it disseminates throughout the network. We also show that our proposed approaches ensure responsive cloud content delivery with minimized service disruption. Edge computing provides an attractive platform for bringing data and processing closer to users in networked environments. Several edge proposals aim to place the edge servers at a couple hop distance from the client to ensure lowest possible compute and network delay. An attractive edge server placement is to co-locate it with existing (cellular) base stations to avoid additional infrastructure establishment costs. However, determining the exact locations for edge servers is an important question that must be resolved for optimal placement. In this paper, we present Anveshak1, a framework that solves the problem of placing edge servers in a geographical topology and provides the optimal solution for edge providers. Our proposed solution considers both end-user application requirements as well as deployment and operating costs incurred by edge platform providers. The placement optimization metric of Anveshak considers the request pattern of users and existing user-established edge servers. In our evaluation based on real datasets, we show that Anveshak achieves 67 increase in user satisfaction while maintaining high server utilization. A device for selectively moistening the flap of envelopes has a moistening member and a pivoting moistening deflector selectively operable to moisten the flap or not. It further comprises a pivoting slide bar to the front of the moistening member and actuated between a protection position and a retracted position in front of the moistening member. The moistening deflector is adapted to cooperate with the slide bar and the moistening member and is coupled to the bar so that they are actuated virtually simultaneously. The device finds applications in automatic mail handling. We present @math , a decision support framework to provision edge servers for online services providers (OSPs). @math takes advantage of the increasingly flexible edge server placement, which is enabled by new technologies such as edge computing platforms, cloudlets and network function virtualization, to optimize the overall performance and cost of edge infrastructures. The key difference between @math and traditional server placement approaches lies on that @math can discover proper unforeseen edge locations which significantly improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of edge provisioning. We show how @math effectively identifies promising edge locations which are close to a collection of users merely with inaccurate network distance estimation methods, e.g., geographic coordinate (GC) and network coordinate systems (NC). We also show how @math comprehensively considers various pragmatic concerns in edge provisioning, such as traffic limits by law or ISP policy, edge site deployment and resource usage cost, over-provisioning for fault tolerance, etc., with a simple optimization model. We simulate @math using real network data at global and county-wide scales. Measurement-driven simulations show that with a given cost budget @math can improve user performance by around 10-45 percent at global scale networks and 15-35 percent at a country-wide scale network.