Time Constrained Service-Aware Migration of Virtualized Services for Mobile Edge Computing

We consider the migration of virtualized services (VSs) in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), so as to facilitate server maintenance, load balancing under mobility, improved energy efficiency and resource utilization, and incident response. We consider a set of VSs that has to be migrated from a source placement to a target placement, while maintaining service continuity as much as possible. We formulate the VS migration problem as an integer programming problem, and analyze its complexity. We propose an efficient iterative algorithm for computing when and in what order the VSs shall be migrated among the MEC nodes. We evaluate the proposed solution in terms of total service value, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive simulations show that our algorithm is computationally effective, and performs close to optimal.