  In mobile edge computing, edge servers are geographically distributed around
base stations placed near end-users to provide highly accessible and efficient
computing capacities and services. In the mobile edge computing environment, a
service provider can deploy its service on hired edge servers to reduce
end-to-end service delays experienced by its end-users allocated to those edge
servers. An optimal deployment must maximize the number of allocated end-users
and minimize the number of hired edge servers while ensuring the required
quality of service for end-users. In this paper, we model the edge user
allocation (EUA) problem as a bin packing problem, and introduce a novel,
optimal approach to solving the EUA problem based on the Lexicographic Goal
Programming technique. We have conducted three series of experiments to
evaluate the proposed approach against two representative baseline approaches.
Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the other
two approaches.
