Mobile Application Placement in Multi-access Edge Computing Environments

Modern mobile applications require both a sufficient amount of infrastructure resources as well as a certain network Quality of Service (QoS) in order to process and respond to user requests efficiently and thus ensure the correct behavior of the applications. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) combined with new mobile communications technologies, such as 5G and 6G, provides the technological basis for fulfilling these requirements. In this context, a key challenge is the deployment of the microservices of the mobile applications within the environment. Since the microservices of an application interact with each other via the network, they must be placed within the MEC environment, taking into account the available resources on the MEC hosts, the network QoS and the location of the corresponding user device. In this paper, we describe an approach for the placement of mobile applications in MEC environments based on Reinforcement Learning, considering the architecture and functionalities of the MEC standard, with the aim of proposing an efficient placement methodology for future mobile networks. -MEC, Edge, Cloud, Application, Placement