A new replica placement mechanism for mobile media streaming in edge computing

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet of things era, cloud computing platforms will face the challenges of massive equipment requirements for access, massive data, insufficient bandwidth, and high power consumption. Edge computing, as a new technology, makes it possible to stream media over the edge network. However, many problems related to file sharing among edge nodes and to the files provided by cloud servers exist. We propose a novel replica placement strategy for mobile media streaming in edge computing (RPME) to address the aforementioned problem. First, we introduce a multilevel replica placement model in the RPME. In the RPME, we acquire the user information and the user‐item rating matrix when the user requests the media data. At the server, we cluster the users according the user information, update the user‐item rating matrix, and then generate a replica recommendation sequence. For when the server submits the replica recommendation sequence to the edge node considering the constraints of the edge node storage capacity and the limitations on the service capacity of the requested replica, we propose an effective replica placement mechanism in the RPME. To show the benefits of the RPME, we also present several experiments to prove its validity.