Monte Carlo-based service migration under multiple constraints in mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing as an emerging technique can provide services for mobile terminals, and meanwhile the mobility of users brings new challenges. When a user moves across different areas, the system needs to determine whether to migrate service so as to guarantee quality of experience for the user. However, it is difficult to obtain the optimal migration policy in real time due to the huge state space. Considering delay-sensitive data-intensive applications run by mobile terminals with limited battery power, an efficient service migration policy should be able to make a good tradeoff among service cost, service delay and terminal energy consumption. Here, an online Monte Carlo-based service migration (MCSM) policy is proposed to minimize service cost under constraints of deadline and terminal energy consumption. A penalty mechanism is designed to update reward when partial or all constraints are not meet. State-action value estimation and policy improvement are triggered only on the completion of each episode. Each episode is traversed reversely to calculate the average cumulative reward so as to improve policy. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can improve service success ratio and reduce average service cost compared to the existing service migration policies.