IJERT-Multi-Access EDGE Computing (MEC): A Mainstay of 5G (original) (raw)
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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2017
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging ecosystem, which aims at converging telecommunication and IT services, providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network. MEC offers storage and computational resources at the edge, reducing latency for mobile end users and utilizing more efficiently the mobile backhaul and core networks. This paper introduces a survey on MEC and focuses on the fundamental key enabling technologies. It elaborates MEC orchestration considering both individual services and a network of MEC platforms supporting mobility, bringing light into the different orchestration deployment options. In addition, this paper analyzes the MEC reference architecture and main deployment scenarios, which offer multitenancy support for application developers, content providers, and third parties. Finally, this paper overviews the current standardization activities and elaborates further on open research challenges.
Multi-Access Edge Computing Deployments for 5G Networks
INTERNATIONAL ENGINEERING CONFERENCE IEC 2019, 2019
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.
Driving forces for Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) IoT integration in 5G
ICT Express
The emergence of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology aims to extend cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access networks, i.e., closer to the end-users. Thus, MEC-enabled 5G wireless systems are envisaged to offer real-time, low-latency, and high-bandwidth access to the radio network resources. Thus, MEC allows network operators to open up their networks to a wide range of innovative services, thereby giving rise to a brand-new ecosystem and a value chain. Furthermore, MEC as an enabling technology will provide new insights into coherent integration of Internet of Things (IoT) in 5G wireless systems. In this context, this paper expounds the four key technologies, including Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Slicing and Information Centric Networking (ICN), that will propel and intensify the integration of MEC IoT in 5G networks. Moreover, our goal is to provide the close alliance between MEC and these four driving technologies in the 5G IoT context and to identify the open challenges, future directions, and concrete integration paths. c
Edge Computing in IoT: A 6G Perspective
2021
Edge computing is one of the key driving forces to enable Beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G networks. Due to the unprecedented increase in traffic volumes and computation demands of future networks, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is considered as a promising solution to provide cloud-computing capabilities within the radio access network (RAN) closer to the end users. There has been a huge amount of research on MEC and its potential applications; however, very little has been said about the key factors of MEC deployment to meet the diverse demands of future applications. In this article, we present key considerations for edge deployments in B5G/6G networks including edge architecture, server location and capacity, user density, security etc. We further provide state-of-the-art edge-centric services in future B5G/6G networks. Lastly, we present some interesting insights and open research problems in edge computing for 6G networks.
Five Driving Forces of Multi-Access Edge Computing
ArXiv, 2018
The emergence of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access networks. MEC provides real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources, allowing operators to open their networks to a new ecosystem and value chain. Moreover, it will provide a new insight to the design of future 5th Generation (5G) wireless systems. This paper describes five key technologies, including Network Function Vitalization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Slicing, Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Internet of Things (IoT), that intensify the widespread of MEC and its adoption. Our goal is to provide the associativity between MEC and these five driving technologies in 5G context while identifying the open challenges, future directions, and tangible integration paths.
5G is the next generation cellular network that aspires to achieve substantial improvement on quality of service, such as higher throughput and lower latency. Edge computing is an emerging technology that enables the evolution to 5G by bringing cloud capabilities near to the end users (or user equipment, UEs) in order to overcome the intrinsic problems of the traditional cloud, such as high latency and the lack of security. In this paper, we establish a taxonomy of edge computing in 5G, which gives an overview of existing state-of-the-art solutions of edge computing in 5G on the basis of objectives, computational platforms, attributes, 5G functions, performance measures, and roles. We also present other important aspects, including the key requirements for its successful deployment in 5G and the applications of edge computing in 5G. Then, we explore, highlight, and categorize recent advancements in edge computing for 5G. By doing so, we reveal the salient features of different edge computing paradigms for 5G. Finally, open research issues are outlined.
A Survey on 5G Enabled Multi-Access Edge Computing for Smart Cities: Issues and Future Prospects
The deployment of 5G is in full swing, with a significant yearly growth in the data traffic expected to reach 26% by the year and data consumption to reach 122 EB per month by 2022 [10]. In parallel, the idea of smart cities has been implemented by various governments and private organizations. One of the main objectives of 5G deployment is to help develop and realize smart cities. 5G can support the enhanced data delivery requirements and the mass connection requirements of a smart city environment. However, for specific high-demanding applications like tactile Internet, transportation, and augmented reality, the cloud-based 5G infrastructure cannot deliver the required quality of services. We suggest using multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology for smart cities' environments to provide the necessary support. In cloud computing, the dependency on a central server for computation and storage adds extra cost in terms of higher latency. We present a few scenarios to demonstrate how the MEC, with its distributed architecture and closer proximity to the end nodes can significantly improve the quality of services by reducing the latency. This paper has surveyed the existing work in MEC for 5G and highlights various challenges and opportunities. Moreover, we propose a unique framework based on the use of MEC for 5G in a smart city environment. This framework works at multiple levels, where each level has its own defined functionalities. The proposed framework uses the MEC and introduces edge-sub levels to keep the computing infrastructure much closer to the end nodes.
Edge Computing in 5G: A Review
IEEE Access
5G is the next generation cellular network that aspires to achieve substantial improvement on quality of service, such as higher throughput and lower latency. Edge computing is an emerging technology that enables the evolution to 5G by bringing cloud capabilities near to the end users (or user equipment, UEs) in order to overcome the intrinsic problems of the traditional cloud, such as high latency and the lack of security. In this paper, we establish a taxonomy of edge computing in 5G, which gives an overview of existing state-of-the-art solutions of edge computing in 5G on the basis of objectives, computational platforms, attributes, 5G functions, performance measures, and roles. We also present other important aspects, including the key requirements for its successful deployment in 5G and the applications of edge computing in 5G. Then, we explore, highlight, and categorize recent advancements in edge computing for 5G. By doing so, we reveal the salient features of different edge computing paradigms for 5G. Finally, open research issues are outlined. INDEX TERMS 5G, cloud computing, edge computing, fog computing.
LightEdge: Mapping the Evolution of Multi-Access Edge Computing in Cellular Networks
IEEE Communications Magazine, 2020
The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm calls for a distribution of computational capacity at the network's edges. Albeit MEC will play a key role in future 5G deployments, it will take some time until the existing 4G networks evolve into a full 5G system. A challenge exists to devise a transition mechanism that allows MEC features to be seamlessly integrated in the current 4G networks. This article introduces a lightweight, ETSI-compliant MEC solution for 4G and 5G networks. The proposed solution, which we name LightEdge, has the main goal of immediately making available the features and capabilities of edge clouds to the mobile users. This article reports on the design and implementation of LightEdge and on its evaluation in a practical latency-sensitive use case.
Survey on Multi-Access Edge Computing for Internet of Things Realization
IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently advanced from an experimental technology to what will become the backbone of future customer value for both product and service sector businesses. This underscores the cardinal role of IoT on the journey towards the fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication systems. IoT technologies augmented with intelligent and big data analytics are expected to rapidly change the landscape of myriads of application domains ranging from health care to smart cities and industrial automations. The emergence of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network, hence providing real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources. IoT is identified as a key use case of MEC, given MEC's ability to provide cloud platform and gateway services at the network edge. MEC will inspire the development of myriads of applications and services with demand for ultra low latency and high Quality of Service (QoS) due to its dense geographical distribution and wide support for mobility. MEC is therefore an important enabler of IoT applications and services which require real-time operations. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview on the exploitation of MEC technology for the realization of IoT applications and their synergies. We further discuss the technical aspects of enabling MEC in IoT and provide some insight into various other integration technologies therein.