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There have been many studies focusing on edge server deployment and service placement in mobile-edge computing (MEC), respectively, but rare works took both of them into consideration. However, edge server deployment and service placement are coupling issues in practice, where the former affects the latter. Besides, the economic benefit of the MEC platform is also a consideration. Due to different service request rates and prices, appropriate service placement solutions are needed to increase the overall profit. In this article, we propose a complete process combining edge server and service placement, where service placement explicitly takes into account the structure of current edge server placement and different service request rates and prices. We design a joint edge server deployment and service placement model with the goal of maximizing the overall profit of all edge servers under the constraints of the number of edge servers, the relationship among edge servers and base stations, the storage capacity, and the computing capacity of each edge server. We propose a two-step method including the clustering algorithm and nonlinear programming to solve the formulated problem. Extensive evaluations based on the real-world data set demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline methods.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.