Resilient planning for multi-access edge computing in sparsely populated areas

Abstract

Resiliency (fault tolerance) is an important aspect in communication networks: a robust and well-planned network must have a strategy to face equipment failures. The planning of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) systems should not only consider computing resources, but also the fiber connections to base stations (BSs) and to the WAN network gateway. This joint design is particularly important in sparsely populated areas (e.g., rural areas), as the distances are much longer than in urban environments. When solving the planning problem for these systems, reserving backup resources for both computing and networks is a must to ensure resiliency. In this paper, we propose and compare different strategies for the planning of resilient MEC networks assuming that there are backup resources for both MEC servers and fibers. The method provides protection against single-fiber failure or single-MEC node failure (with part or all the servers affected). The different approaches are evaluated in terms of cost and propagation delay from BSs to the primary and backup MEC servers. Results show the advantages of using edge technology instead of a centralized design, and they also suggest that is more convenient to jointly plan the main and backup MEC architecture than to deploy the backup resources over an existent infrastructure.