Two-Stage Robust Edge Service Placement and Sizing under Demand Uncertainty

Edge computing has emerged as a key technology to reduce network traffic, improve user experience, and enable various Internet of Things applications. From the perspective of a service provider (SP), how to jointly optimize the service placement, sizing, and workload allocation decisions is an important and challenging problem, which becomes even more complicated when considering demand uncertainty. To this end, we propose a novel two-stage adaptive robust optimization framework to help the SP optimally determine the locations for installing their service (i.e., placement) and the amount of computing resource to purchase from each location (i.e., sizing). The service placement and sizing solution of the proposed model can hedge against any possible realization within the uncertainty set of traffic demand. Given the first-stage robust solution, the optimal resource and workload allocation decisions are computed in the second-stage after the uncertainty is revealed. To solve the two-stage model, in this paper, we present an iterative solution by employing the column-and-constraint generation method that decomposes the underlying problem into a master problem and a max-min subproblem associated with the second stage. Extensive numerical results are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage robust optimization model.