A two-stage Multi-Criteria Optimization method for service placement in decentralized edge micro-clouds

Community networks are becoming increasingly popular due to the growing demand for network connectivity in both rural and urban areas. Community networks are owned and managed at the edge by volunteers. Their irregular topology, the heterogeneity of resources and their unreliable behavior claim for advanced optimization methods to place services in the network. In particular, an efficient service placement method is key for the performance of these systems. This work presents the Multi-Criteria Optimal Placement method, a novel and fast two-stage multi-objective method to place services in decentralized community network edge micro-clouds. A comprehensive set of computational experiments is carried out using real traces of Guifi.net, which is the largest production community network worldwide. According to the results, the proposed method outperforms both the random placement method used currently in Guifi.net and the Bandwidth-aware Service Placement method, which provides the best known solutions in the literature, by a mean gap in bandwidth gain of about 53% and 10%, respectively, while it also reduces the number of resources used.