A Migration Path Toward Green Edge Gaming

Abstract

5G and beyond 5G networks will allow novel use cases by placing constrained computing nodes at the edge, following the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm. Edge nodes could be partially powered by intermittent renewable energies, leading to the possibility of having time-varying computing capacities. In this scenario, we tackle the problem of how to support gaming at the edge of the cellular network. Moving cloud-based games to the edge could be a premium service for end-users, thanks to reduced latency and higher bandwidth. The goal of our paper is to design a scheme that maximizes the utility of a service/infrastructure provider in a MEC scenario, with time-varying MEC nodes capacities powered by intermittent renewable energies. We formulate a multi-dimensional integer linear programming problem, proving that it is NP Hard in the strong sense. We prove that our problem is sub-modular and propose an efficient heuristic, GREENING, which considers the allocation of gaming sessionse and their migration. Through simulations, we show that our heuristic achieves performance close to what achievable by a solver, except with extremely lower complexity, and performs near-optimally, 20% better than state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of system utility. We also show that our scheme is compliant with currently adopted standards by ETSI and meant to support novel networking principles like network slicing.