Anveshak: Placing Edge Servers In The Wild

New publication: Nitinder Mohan, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Pengyuan Zhou, Jussi Kangasharju; Anveshak: Placing Edge Servers In The Wild; in Proceedings of SIGCOMM workshop on Mobile Edge Communication (MECOMM), SIGCOMM 2018

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 Anveshak, 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.