GP4ESP: a hybrid genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm for edge server placement

Edge computing has attracted wide attention due to its ultra-low latency services, as well as the prevalence of smart devices and intelligent applications. Edge server placement (ESP) is one of the key issues needed to be addressed for effective and efficient request processing, by deciding which edge stations to equip with limited edge resources. Due to NP-hardness of ESP, some works have designed meta-heuristic algorithms for solving it. While these algorithms either exploited only one kind of meta-heuristic search strategies or separately perform two different meta-heuristic algorithms. This can result in limit performance of ESP solutions due to the "No Free Lunch" theorem. In addition, existing algorithms ignored the computing delay of edge servers (ESs) on request process, resulting in overestimation of the service quality. To address these issues, in this article, we first formulate ESP problem with the objective of minimizing the overall response time, considering heterogeneous edge servers with various service capacity. Then, to search effective or even the best ESP solutions, we propose a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm (named GP4ESP) by taking advantage of both the powerful global search ability of genetic algorithm (GA) and the fast convergence of particle swarm optimization (PSO). GP4ESP effectively fuses the merits of GA and PS by integrating the swarm cognition of PSO into the evolutionary strategy of GA. At last, we conducted extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of GP4ESP, and results show that GP4ESP achieves 18.2%-20.7% shorter overall response time, compared with eleven up-to-date ESP solving algorithms, and the performance improvement is stable as the scale of ESP is varied.