A Placement Method of the 5G Edge Nodes Based on the Hotspot Distribution of Mobile Users

Due to the emergence of various new applications, such as short videos and online games, higher requirements of their computing and storage capacity are demanded of mobile networks. The traditional cloud computing paradigm has the shortcomings of large latency and high bandwidth demand of the core network. Therefore, how to mine the hotspot distribution of these applications and reasonably configure 5G edge nodes to reduce latency and core network bandwidth are facing great challenges. To address these issues, we designed a placement method for the 5G edge nodes based on mobile hotspots. In this method, we first cluster all locations from the user trajectories to obtain the cluster areas. Further, we extract the features, such as the number of users and duration time in all cluster areas, and extract the hotspots from all cluster areas based on the features of each cluster. Then, we introduce the base station’s high load utilization rate and the core network’s bandwidth reduction rate as the optimization parameters to construct the mathematical model of multi-objective optimization. Finally, we formalize the model into a 0–1 integer programming problem and design a greedy algorithm to solve this model. We also complete a series of experiments to evaluate our proposed methods using the GeoLife dataset. The experimental results show that the high load utilization rate can be increased up to 7.69%, and the bandwidth reduction rate of the core network can be improved up to 6.34%.