Towards collaborative storage scheduling using alternating direction method of multipliers for mobile edge cloud

Performance of cloud computing would be much improved by extending storage capabilities to devices at the edge of network. Unfortunately, the commonly employed algorithms fail to be adaptive to the new storage pattern on mobile edge cloud. To address this issue, we propose a collaborative storage architecture model and an alternating-direction-method-of-multipliers-based collaborative storage scheduling algorithm called ACMES (Algorithm of Collaborative Mobile Edge Storage), in which heterogeneous information of nodes in mobile edge cloud is considered and integrated to make decisions. Besides, feasible solutions for storage will be acquired after iterations of computing. By formulating the collaborative storage scheduling problem in the mobile edge cloud and designing the collaborative decision-making process with the theory of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), the proposed ACMES is able to minimize power usage and the risk of node withdrawal without reducing the reliability of node storage, and meanwhile make storage scheduling decisions at the edge environment directly and work in a distributed and parallel way. The convergence analysis shows that ACMES has the ability to solve complicated mobile edge cloud storage problems in reality. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness as well as its superiority to three existing strategies (ADM, RDM and ERASURE) in total cost, reliability, power usage and withdrawal risks.