Context-Aware and Adaptive QoS Prediction for Mobile Edge Computing Services

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows the use of its services with low latency, location awareness and mobility support to make up for the disadvantages of cloud computing, and has gained a considerable momentum recently. However, the dynamically changing quality of service (QoS) may result in failures of QoS-aware recommendation and composition of MEC services, which significantly degrades users’ satisfaction and negates the advantages of MEC. To address this issue, by considering user-related and service-related contextual factors and various MEC services scheduling scenarios, we propose two context-aware QoS prediction schemes for MEC services. The first scheme is designed for the situations when MEC services are scheduled in real-time, which contains two context-aware real-time QoS estimation methods. One method can estimate the real-time multi-QoS of MEC services and the other method can estimate the real-time fitted QoS of MEC services. The second scheme is designed for the situations when MEC services are scheduled in the future. This scheme includes two context-aware QoS prediction methods. One method can predict the multi-QoS of MEC services and the other method can predict the fitted QoS of MEC services. Finally, adaptive QoS prediction strategies are developed in the light of characteristics of the proposed QoS prediction methods. According to these strategies, the most appropriate QoS prediction method can be scheduled. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our proposed approaches and to demonstrate their performance.