Mobility-Aware MEC Planning With a GNN-Based Graph Partitioning Framework

Mobile service continuity is essential important to ensure that user sessions and services will survive user mobility. The 5G enhances its mobility management by providing the flexibility and offering three types of Session and Service Continuity (SSC) modes to address various service continuity requirements. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a type of widely adopted network architecture that delivers network services from the boundary of the mobile network by provisioning a set of edge servers. Determining an optimum planning of MEC edge servers, which involves determining edge servers appropriate geographical positions and their serving areas, is a precondition for more efficient service provisioning and better usage of network resources. In this work, we investigate the MEC servers planning problem by considering the management cost for maintaining MEC service continuity. The problem is formulated as a graph partitioning problem to partition the RAN graph with minimum SSC management costs and balanced MEC servers workloads. Then, we adapt a generalizable approximate Graph Partitioning framework which leverages on Graph Neural Network (GNN) to embed the RAN network spacial feature and on Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) for graph partitioning. Based on the framework, we propose a MEC server planning algorithm named MECP-GAP. Finally, we evaluate MECP-GAP with extensive simulations and real network data. Comparing to several baselines, MECP-GAP achieves better performance with lower running time.