Recovery for overloaded mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows the use of its services with low latency, location awareness and mobility support to make up for the disadvantages of cloud computing. But an overloaded MEC system or any MEC system failure significantly degrades quality of experience (QoE) and negates the advantages of MEC. In this paper, we propose two different recovery schemes for overloaded or broken MEC. One recovery scheme is where an overloaded MEC offloads its work to available neighboring MECs within transfer range. The other recovery scheme is for situations when there is no available neighboring MEC within transfer range. The second scheme accesses user devices of a neighboring MEC adjacent to the overloaded MEC as ad-hoc relay nodes in order to bridge the transfer disconnect between two MECs. Numerical experiments demonstrated the performance and verified the possibility of the proposed schemes, providing insightful results for potential future research. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.