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.

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 multi-tenancy support for application developers, content providers, and third parties Finally, this paper overviews the current standardization activities and elaborates further on open research challenges

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On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration

The rapid uptake of mobile devices and the rising popularity of mobile applications and services pose unprecedented demands on mobile and wireless networking infrastructure. Upcoming 5G systems are evolving to support exploding mobile traffic volumes, real-time extraction of fine-grained analytics, and agile management of network resources, so as to maximize user experience. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging, as mobile environments are increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution is to resort to advanced machine learning techniques, in order to help manage the rise in data volumes and algorithm-driven applications. The recent success of deep learning underpins new and powerful tools that tackle problems in this space. In this paper, we bridge the gap between deep learning and mobile and wireless networking research, by presenting a comprehensive survey of the crossovers between the two areas. We first briefly introduce essential background and state-of-the-art in deep learning techniques with potential applications to networking. We then discuss several techniques and platforms that facilitate the efficient deployment of deep learning onto mobile systems. Subsequently, we provide an encyclopedic review of mobile and wireless networking research based on deep learning, which we categorize by different domains. Drawing from our experience, we discuss how to tailor deep learning to mobile environments. We complete this survey by pinpointing current challenges and open future directions for research.

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Deep Learning in Mobile and Wireless Networking: A Survey

With the development of recent innovative applications (e.g., augment reality, self-driving, and various cognitive applications), more and more computation-intensive and data-intensive tasks are delay-sensitive. Mobile edge computing in ultra-dense network is expected as an effective solution for meeting the low latency demand. However, the distributed computing resource in edge cloud and energy dynamics in the battery of mobile device makes it challenging to offload tasks for users. In this paper, leveraging the idea of software defined network, we investigate the task offloading problem in ultra-dense network aiming to minimize the delay while saving the battery life of user’s equipment. Specifically, we formulate the task offloading problem as a mixed integer non-linear program which is NP-hard. In order to solve it, we transform this optimization problem into two sub-problems, i.e., task placement sub-problem and resource allocation sub-problem. Based on the solution of the two sub-problems, we propose an efficient offloading scheme. Simulation results prove that the proposed scheme can reduce 20% of the task duration with 30% energy saving, compared with random and uniform task offloading schemes.

Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing in Software Defined Ultra-Dense Network

This article proposes an approach to enhance users' experience of video streaming in the context of smart cities. The proposed approach relies on the concept of MEC as a key factor in enhancing QoS. It sustains QoS by ensuring that applications/services follow the mobility of users, realizing the "Follow Me Edge" concept. The proposed scheme enforces an autonomic creation of MEC services to allow anywhere anytime data access with optimum QoE and reduced latency. Considering its application in smart city scenarios, the proposed scheme represents an important solution for reducing core network traffic and ensuring ultra-short latency through a smart MEC architecture capable of achieving the 1 ms latency dream for the upcoming 5G mobile systems.

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Mobile Edge Computing Potential in Making Cities Smarter

Typically, maintaining static pool of cloud resources to meet peak requirements with good service quality makes the cloud infrastructure costly. To cope with this, this paper proposes an approach that enables a cloud-infrastructure to automatically and dynamically scale-up or scale-down resources of a virtualized environment aiming for efficient resource utilization and improved quality of experience (QoE) of the offered services. The QoE-aware approach ensures a truly elastic infrastructure, capable of handling sudden load surges while reducing resource and management costs. The paper also discusses the applicability of the proposed approach within the ETSI NFV MANO framework for cloud-based 5G mobile systems.

QoE-aware elasticity support in cloud-native 5G systems

To enhance video streaming experience for mobile users, we propose an approach towards Quality-of-Experience (QoE) aware on-the-fly transcoding. The proposed approach relies on the concept of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) as a key enabler in enhancing service quality. Our scheme involves an autonomic creation of a transcoding service as a Virtual Network Function (VNF) and ensures dynamic rate switching of the streamed video to maintain the desirable quality. This edge-assistive transcoding and adaptive streaming results in reduced computational loads and reduced core network traffic. The proposed solution represents a complete miniature content delivery network infrastructure on the edge, ensuring reduced latency and better quality of experience

Sunny Dutta

Papers

On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration

Mobile Edge Computing Potential in Making Cities Smarter

QoE-aware elasticity support in cloud-native 5G systems

On-the-Fly QoE-Aware Transcoding in the Mobile Edge