Multi-Access Edge Computing

 

With the advancement of technology, people tend to use more devices and that leads to the growth in global data traffic. Traffic generated by new applications and services has increased and the number of connected things is increasing day by day. However, most of the devices have finite storage and processing capabilities even though many applications demand to process and store a huge amount of data. As a solution for this mismatch between the demand and the capabilities of the devices, Multi-Access Edge Computing has emerged.

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) provides cloud-computing capabilities and an IT environment at the edge of the network. It moves the data traffic to the edge of the network and closer to the customer from a centralized cloud. All the data are not sent to a cloud for processing and the network edge processes and stores data. This enables to have ultra-low latency, high bandwidth and real-time performance.

Source: https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/what-is/multi-access-edge-computing

MEC Architecture

The Multi-Access Edge Computing architecture is composed of System level and Host level. The system level consists of MEC Orchestrator which maintains information on servers, available resources, MEC services and topology of the MEC system. MEC Orchestrator selects MEC hosts to instantiate applications, onboard application packages, trigger application relocation and trigger application instantiation and termination. The host level  consists of the MEC Platform Manager and the Virtualization Infrastructure Manager (VIM). The MEC Platform Manager is responsible for managing application life cycle, providing functions for element management and controlling application rules and requirements. This processes fault reports and performance measurements received from the Virtualization Infrastructure Manager as well. The VIM is allocating virtualized resources, preparing virtualization infrastructure to run software images, provisioning MEC applications and monitoring application faults and performance. The MEC Host consists of an MEC Platform and a Virtualization Infrastructure (VI). The MEC Platform carries out functionalities required to run MEC applications on a Virtualization Infrastructure and VI carries out data plane functionalities to execute traffic rules received through MEC Platform. Also, it guides the traffic among applications and networks.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333039750_Distributed_Artificial_Intelligence_with_Multi_Agent_Systems_for_MEC/figures?lo=1

Why MEC?

Since MEC offers cloud-computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the network, it is characterized with proximity, ultra-low latency, high bandwidth and virtualization which gives benefits to the users. It provides,

• New services and new revenue streams

• Real-time analytics with lower latency

• Reduced cloud data storage and transport costs

• Improved availability of applications

• Conserved network bandwidth and reduced network congestion

• Strengthened security and compliance

These benefits lead to use MEC for applications which require to handle exponential growth in traffic. Currently, this is commonly used for data and video analytics, location tracking services, Internet of Things, Augmented reality and local hosting of content. MEC comes to rescue when the network infrastructures need to scale to deliver high volumes of data in case of an explosion of connected devices. With this, service providers can provide innovative applications and services while bringing flexible cloud capabilities to satisfy customer demands.

References

• https://www.etsi.org/technologies/multi-access-edge-computing

• https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/what-is/multi-access-edge-computing

• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9113305