Resource scheduling in mobile edge computing using improved ant colony algorithm for space information network.

Summary: With the development of space information network (SIN), new network applications are emerging. Satellites are not only used for storage and transmission but also gradually used for calculation and analysis, so the demand for resources is increasing. But satellite resources are still limited. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered an effective technique to reduce the pressure on satellite resources. To solve the problem of task execution delay caused by limited satellite resources, we designed Space Mobile Edge Computing Network (SMECN) architecture. According to this architecture, we propose a resource scheduling method. First, we decompose the user tasks in SMECN, so that the tasks can be assigned to different servers. An improved ant colony resource scheduling algorithm for SMECN is proposed. The heuristic factors and pheromones of the ant colony algorithm are improved through time and resource constraints, and the roulette algorithm is applied to route selection to avoid falling into the local optimum. We propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm to improve the contract network protocol to cope with the dynamic changes of the SIN and dynamically adjust the task execution to improve the service capability of the SIN. The simulation results show that when the number of tasks reaches 200, the algorithm proposed in this paper takes 17.52% less execution time than the Min‐Min algorithm, uses 9.58% less resources than the PSO algorithm, and achieves a resource allocation rate of 91.65%. Finally, introducing dynamic scheduling algorithms can effectively reduce task execution time and improve task availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]