Software Networks, 2nd Edition

5MEC

MEC (mobile edge computing) was defined by the European standardization organization ETSI, in order to take into account very short reaction times between the user and the datacenter which controls this user’s applications. Among the applications targeted by the environment, we can mention autonomous vehicles, which require latency time of milliseconds, local video images processing to decide whether to transmit them to a video processing platform located further away, augmented reality, real-time mobile applications, etc.

Thanks to MEC, we can obtain the equivalent of Cloud computing on the endpoints of the network and especially on the radio access network (RAN), thus very close to the user’s mobile. The RAN offers a service environment with a very low latency and a large bandwidth, as well as real-time access to data linked to wireless (radio, location, cell load, intercellular change, etc.). Mobile edge computing can be seen as the setup of a Cloud server installed very close to the user’s mobile. Its first use is to virtualize equipment located between the client and the MEC datacenter in this datacenter. Moreover, it is also possible to virtualize some RAN equipment in the MEC server.

The ETSI defines the MEC environment as described in Figure 5.1.

The mobile edge host contains the following elements:

• – Virtualization infrastructure supplies computing, storage and network resources in order to execute applications on platforms located on the periphery.
• – The mobile ...