Efficiency of Virtualization over MEC plus Cloud

We study average performance and costs for routing service requests in a virtualized environment, where either the MEC or the Cloud can serve user's requests. Employing a simple yet precise analytical model validated via simulation, we focus on latency, service request losses, energy consumption, and provider utility. The model is very effective in providing insight and guidelines for setting up server selection strategies with different characteristics (e.g., energy consumption, penalties, etc.) and performance requirements. In particular, our results show that the MEC is latency-efficient but incurs higher costs than Cloud, and then, to make its use sustainable, it is desirable that the MEC server is powered with renewable source energy.