User-Centric Edge Sharing Mechanism in Software-Defined Ultra-Dense Networks

The emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) evolutionarily extends the cloud services to the network edge. In order to efficiently coordinate distributed edge resources, software defined networking (SDN) at the network edge has been explored to realize the integrated management of communication, computation, and cache (3C) resources. However, many research efforts, in software-defined edge networks, are mainly devoted to 1C or 2C resource sharing. Motivated by high service performance and user demands, we propose a user-centric edge resource sharing model for software-defined ultra-dense network (SD-UDN) where multiple MEC servers around small base stations (SBSs) can share their 3C resources through OpenFlow-enabled switches. In particular, the service models of MEC servers and users are formulated to optimize the service process by minimizing the service delay, which is NP-hard. To address this NP-hard issue, a service association model is constructed based on design structure matrix (DSM), and a simulated annealing algorithm is employed to further optimize the service association model for reducing time complexity and offering a nearoptimal solution. Compared with traditional 1C or 2C resource sharing, the proposed edge resource sharing model can guarantee lower service delay for users.