Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

Technological evolution of mobile user equipment (UEs), such as smartphones or laptops, goes hand-in-hand with evolution of new mobile applications. However, running computationally demanding applications at the UEs is constrained by limited battery capacity and energy consumption of the UEs. A suitable solution extending the battery life-time of the UEs is to offload the applications demanding huge processing to a conventional centralized cloud. Nevertheless, this option introduces significant execution delay consisting of delivery of the offloaded applications to the cloud and back plus time of the computation at the cloud. Such a delay is inconvenient and makes the offloading unsuitable for real-time applications. To cope with the delay problem, a new emerging concept, known as mobile edge computing (MEC), has been introduced. The MEC brings computation and storage resources to the edge of mobile network enabling it to run the highly demanding applications at the UE while meeting strict delay requirements. The MEC computing resources can be exploited also by operators and third parties for specific purposes. In this paper, we first describe major use cases and reference scenarios where the MEC is applicable. After that we survey existing concepts integrating MEC functionalities to the mobile networks and discuss current advancement in standardization of the MEC. The core of this survey is, then, focused on user-oriented use case in the MEC, i.e., computation offloading. In this regard, we divide the research on computation offloading to three key areas: 1) decision on computation offloading; 2) allocation of computing resource within the MEC; and 3) mobility management. Finally, we highlight lessons learned in area of the MEC and we discuss open research challenges yet to be addressed in order to fully enjoy potentials offered by the MEC.

Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey on Architecture and Computation Offloading

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emergent architecture where cloud computing services are extended to the edge of networks leveraging mobile base stations. As a promising edge technology, it can be applied to mobile, wireless, and wireline scenarios, using software and hardware platforms, located at the network edge in the vicinity of end-users. MEC provides seamless integration of multiple application service providers and vendors toward mobile subscribers, enterprises, and other vertical segments. It is an important component in the 5G architecture which supports variety of innovative applications and services where ultralow latency is required. This paper is aimed to present a comprehensive survey of relevant research and technological developments in the area of MEC. It provides the definition of MEC, its advantages, architectures, and application areas; where we in particular highlight related research and future directions. Finally, security and privacy issues and related existing solutions are also discussed.

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Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey

Technological evolution of mobile user equipments (UEs), such as smartphones or laptops, goes hand-in-hand with evolution of new mobile applications. However, running computationally demanding applications at the UEs is constrained by limited battery capacity and energy consumption of the UEs. Suitable solution extending the battery life-time of the UEs is to offload the applications demanding huge processing to a conventional centralized cloud (CC). Nevertheless, this option introduces significant execution delay consisting in delivery of the offloaded applications to the cloud and back plus time of the computation at the cloud. Such delay is inconvenient and make the offloading unsuitable for real-time applications. To cope with the delay problem, a new emerging concept, known as mobile edge computing (MEC), has been introduced. The MEC brings computation and storage resources to the edge of mobile network enabling to run the highly demanding applications at the UE while meeting strict delay requirements. The MEC computing resources can be exploited also by operators and third parties for specific purposes. In this paper, we first describe major use cases and reference scenarios where the MEC is applicable. After that we survey existing concepts integrating MEC functionalities to the mobile networks and discuss current advancement in standardization of the MEC. The core of this survey is, then, focused on user-oriented use case in the MEC, i.e., computation offloading. In this regard, we divide the research on computation offloading to three key areas: i) decision on computation offloading, ii) allocation of computing resource within the MEC, and iii) mobility management. Finally, we highlight lessons learned in area of the MEC and we discuss open research challenges yet to be addressed in order to fully enjoy potentials offered by the MEC.

Mobile Edge Computing, Fog et al.: A Survey and Analysis of Security Threats and Challenges

Certificateless public key cryptography CL-PKC is a cryptosystem solving the key escrow problem of identity-based cryptography. One of the applications of CL-PKC is certificateless aggregate signature CLAS that in practice can be used to efficiently verify concealed data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. CLAS is referred to as an extension of certificateless signature, which in particular performs verification for many signatures efficiently. Therefore, not only plenty of CLAS schemes have been proposed but also the security models of CLAS were introduced in the literature. Recently, some CLAS schemes are extended from specific certificateless signature CLS schemes. However, we found that two certificateless signature CLS and their corresponding CLAS schemes are not secure. In this paper, we simplify the relation of security definitions of CLS and CLAS. Then, a new CLAS scheme is proposed, which leads to the advantages of both certificateless cryptography and aggregate signature. Moreover, our scheme only depends on constant pairing operations to verify a large number of signatures per time, because pairing is a complicated operation with high cost in computations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Certificateless aggregate signature with efficient verification

Handover schemes play a vital role on fog computing service (FCS) provided through vehicular network. It not only determines the quality of services (QoSs) but also the security and safety of vehicular network system against adversaries. As a part of handover process, authentication between vehicles and a new fog node (FN) significantly contributes to protecting private information and infrastructure of vehicular network at once. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme for handover process considering limited access FCS in the vehicular network environment and also service reservation scenario at login and service request phase. In the proposed scheme, mutual authentication process is assisted by a cloud server (CS) during login and service request phase in which CS distributes the credentials for on-the-road authentication between the vehicles and FN installed on road side unit (RSU). We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is lightweight due to employing one-way hash function and exclusive-or operation extensively. In addition, our scheme is efficient in terms of computational cost as well as computation cost. We show that our scheme achieves 1.1-56.67 times faster computation and also reduces the total message size by 30%-58.21% in comparison with the previous authentication schemes in the most relevant environment. The informal and formal security analyses show that this authentication scheme can protect the secrecy of transactions of all interacting entities against various known attacks. In addition, validation using SPAN software based on AVISPA also confirms that the proposed authentication scheme can satisfy mutual authentication goal and, at the same time, also protect against replay and man-in-the-middle attack.

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A Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Fog Computing Service Handover in Vehicular Network Environment

Passing through a rural area with a limited network infrastructure may disrupt fog computing support for vehicles. As a result, some applications on vehicles may turn off and bother the performance of the vehicular systems. In order to escape from this kind of situation, vehicular fog computing is discussed in recent times as an alternative of fog computing support while passing through a blank spot of network infrastructure. However, it is not feasible to establish a trusted vehicular fog computing service among vehicles without mutual trust. To deal with this situation, this paper proposes a method called Bidding-Price-based Transaction (BPT) for vehicular fog computing service in rural areas. This method is composed of bidding-price-based mutual trust establishment between client vehicle and server vehicle and also payoff assignment based on transaction evaluation. By applying this method, trusted fog computing service transactions between two vehicles can be achieved without the direct assistance of any trusted third party as a validating entity. The simulation results and feasibility analysis then validate the performance of the BPT scheme in rural areas. Based on feasibility analysis, we claim that the BPT scheme can be realized by adjusting vehicle speed and transmission range with respect to the size of offloaded data.

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BPT Scheme: Establishing Trusted Vehicular Fog Computing Service for Rural Area Based on Blockchain Approach

Nowadays the rapid development of technology can be observed in every aspect of human life, with no exception to the educational world. In particular, implementation of secure online examination system is a hot topic. Issues that should be addressed in the secure online examination system are computer and network security issues of the system and prevention of cheatings by examinees. In our paper, we provide a website application and a secure network design which can prevent cheatings by examinees, and examine both of them in aspects of security and cheating prevention.

Masahiro Mambo

Papers

Mobile Edge Computing, Fog et al.: A Survey and Analysis of Security Threats and Challenges

Certificateless aggregate signature with efficient verification

A Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Fog Computing Service Handover in Vehicular Network Environment

BPT Scheme: Establishing Trusted Vehicular Fog Computing Service for Rural Area Based on Blockchain Approach

Toward constructing a secure online examination system