  Shared edge computing platforms deployed at the radio access network are
expected to significantly improve quality of service delivered by Application
Service Providers (ASPs) in a flexible and economic way. However, placing edge
service in every possible edge site by an ASP is practically infeasible due to
the ASP's prohibitive budget requirement. In this paper, we investigate the
edge service placement problem of an ASP under a limited budget, where the ASP
dynamically rents computing/storage resources in edge sites to host its
applications in close proximity to end users. Since the benefit of placing edge
service in a specific site is usually unknown to the ASP a priori, optimal
placement decisions must be made while learning this benefit. We pose this
problem as a novel combinatorial contextual bandit learning problem. It is
"combinatorial" because only a limited number of edge sites can be rented to
provide the edge service given the ASP's budget. It is "contextual" because we
utilize user context information to enable finer-grained learning and decision
making. To solve this problem and optimize the edge computing performance, we
propose SEEN, a Spatial-temporal Edge sErvice placemeNt algorithm. Furthermore,
SEEN is extended to scenarios with overlapping service coverage by
incorporating a disjunctively constrained knapsack problem. In both cases, we
prove that our algorithm achieves a sublinear regret bound when it is compared
to an oracle algorithm that knows the exact benefit information. Simulations
are carried out on a real-world dataset, whose results show that SEEN
significantly outperforms benchmark solutions.
