Location-Privacy-Aware Service Migration in Mobile Edge Computing

To cope with user mobility and resource constraints of the edge servers, various service migration policies have been proposed in mobile edge computing (MEC) to achieve a tradeoff between user-perceived delay and the service migration cost by moving the service to the user as close as possible. However, there is a risk of user location privacy leakage if a malicious eavesdropper tracks the service migration trajectory. In this paper, we investigate service migration in MEC by taking the risk of location privacy leakage into account. More specifically, we define the total cost of the system as the combination of the migration cost, user-perceived delay and the risk of location privacy leakage. We formulate the service migration problem as a Markov decision process, and propose an efficient algorithm to find the optimal solution that minimize the long-term total cost. Finally, the simulations based on real-world taxi traces in San Francisco show that the proposed method can make service migration decisions effectively protect the location privacy of users, as well as achieves a lower total cost than other baseline methods.