A New Cloudlet Placement Method Based on Affinity Propagation for Cyber-Physical-Social Systems in Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) integrates the cyber, physical and social spaces together. There are a large number of mobile users in CPSS that need low latency services. Fortunately, mobile edge computing (MEC) is a novel technology which can provide such services. The edge server plays a key role in MEC, but how to manage the edge server is an important challenge. For one thing, the number of cloudlets and the resource are limited. For another, the number of mobile devices (MDs) is very large and randomly distributed. And thus, how to determine the suitable number of cloudlets while serving the maximum number of MDs is significant. To this end, a new cloudlet placement method based on improved Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm is proposed to solve the above problems. More specially, the improved AP algorithm can obtain the least number of cloudlets while covering the largest number of MDs. In addition, the load balancing strategy is used to ensure that the load of each cloudlet maintains a balanced state. Last but not the least, our proposed method can be used in scenarios where users move.