Enhanced Profit-Driven Optimization for Flexible Server Deployment and Service Placement in Multi-User Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Edge computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to meet the increasing demands of latency-sensitive and computationally intensive applications. In this context, efficient server deployment and service placement are crucial for optimizing performance and increasing platform profit. This paper investigates the problem of server deployment and service placement in a multi-user scenario, aiming to enhance the profit of Mobile Network Operators while considering constraints related to distance thresholds, resource limitations, and connectivity requirements. We demonstrate that this problem is NP-hard. To address it, we propose a two-stage method to decouple the problem. In stage I, server deployment is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem within the framework of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). We introduce the Server Deployment with Q-learning (SDQ) algorithm to establish a relatively stable server deployment strategy. In stage II, service placement is formulated as a constrained Integer Nonlinear Programming (INLP) problem. We present the Service Placement with Interior Barrier Method (SPIB) and Tree-based Branch-and-Bound (TDB) algorithms and theoretically prove their feasibility. For scenarios where the number of users changes dynamically, we propose the Distance-and-Utilization Balance Algorithm (DUBA). Extensive experiments validate the exceptional performance of our proposed algorithms in enhancing the profit.