Criticality-Awareness Edge User Allocation for Public Safety

Edge computing provides a novel computing paradigm by deploying services on edge servers to serve nearby end-users with low latency. In this regard, a suitable allocation strategy is crucial that maximizes the number of users served at the minimum overall cost, which is referred to as the Edge User Allocation (EUA) problem. However, when edge computing meets public safety, some critical issues have not been fully considered by existing EUA approaches. Among these issues, the levels of danger to individuals quantitatively indicate whether individuals are in danger in an emergency. Hence, the inclusion of these levels impacts the priority for allocating resources in the EUA problem. In this paper, these levels are defined as individual criticalities formally. Then, we take them into account to formulate the novel CRiticality-EUA (CR-EUA) problem, and prove its NP-hardness. To solve this problem, an optimal approach, named CR-EUA-O, is proposed by utilizing the Integer Programming technique. Furthermore, we propose an approach with a proven approximation ratio, named CR-EUA-H, as an effective and efficient solution. Experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset to evaluate our approaches against four representative approaches. The results show the superior performance of our approaches in the overall criticality and execution time.