Multi-Access Edge Computing Deployments for 5G Networks

Abstract

The growth of the telecommunication industry is fast-paced with groundbreaking engineering achievements. Notwithstanding the technological advancement in the industry, it had continued to cope with the phenomenon of resource constraint in portable mobile telecommunication devices compared to fixed and tethered devices. 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. Solutions such as cloudlets, cyber foraging, mobile cloud computing (MCC), and more recently but most applicable, multi-access edge computing (MEC) have been proffered with different application methodologies including computational offloading, distributed computing, thin clients, middleware, mobile environment cloning as well as representational state transfer. There is a need to satisfy requirements of new and emerging use cases, especially the deployments of 5G coming up with applications such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), intelligent transport systems (ITS), connected autonomous vehicle (CAV), smart hospitals, ultra high definition multi-feed live streaming, etc. The usage patterns of most of these different applications, though not always, is ephemeral and on-demand, except that the demand will be numerous, huge, asymmetric and highly latency-sensitive in terms of needs for computation, storage and analytics while at the fringe of the network where data are being generated and results being applied. In this research, we evaluated 5G end-to-end transport for vantage location of MEC server to achieve low user plane latency.