CONTAINER BASED MULTI-ACCESS EDGE COMPUTING FOR 5G NETWORKS

Abstract

The growth of the telecommunication industry is fast paced with ground-breaking engineering achievements. Despite this, portable mobile handheld devices have very low computational, storage and energy carrying capacity occasioned by the needs to satisfy portability, very small form factor, ergonomics, style and trends. Proposals such as cloudlets, cyber foraging, mobile cloud computing (MCC), and more recently but most applicable, multi-access edge computing (MEC) have been proffered. New and emerging use cases, especially the deployments of 5G will bring up a lot of latency sensitive and resource-intensive applications. To address these challenges, this work introduced the use of secure containerization for MEC applications and location of MEC host at the 5G centralized unit within the radio access network (RAN) aiding offloading of computational, storage and analytics requirements close to UE at the fringe of the network where the data are being generated and results being applied. The major contribution of this thesis is the use of secured containerization technology to replace virtual machines, making it possible to use containers for MEC applications, reducing application overhead while satisfying the isolation of MEC infrastructure as required by the European Technology Standard Institute (ETSI) to ensure MEC application security. 5G end-to-end transport specifications were evaluated for the vantage location of MEC server within the radio access network and achieved theoretical values between 4.1ms and 14.1ms end-to-end latency. These figures satisfy requirements of VR/AR (7-12ms); tactile Internet (<10ms); Vehicle-to-Vehicle (< 10ms); Manufacturing & Robotic Control/Safety Systems (1-10ms). The results confirmed that edge computing has lower user plane latency figures and reduced backhaul traffic with lower application failure rate. Secured containerised Multi-access computing infrastructures have many advantages of mobile cloud computing for mobile wireless device computational power and energy carrying capacity deficiencies to cater asymmetric UE applications. Applications hosted within the RAN have better support for new and emerging application requirements in terms of high amount of computational, storage and analytics capabilities while at low latency figures. Edge deployments will reduce the pressure on network operators backhaul link saving end-to-end ecosystem from collapse due to heavy backhaul traffic that might result from billions of 5G UEs. No matter how fast 5G network will be, MEC will ensure the need not to transport huge data for processing in the cloud and returning the results to the UE. This will enhance privacy and security while also conserving bandwidth.