Mobile Edge Computing and Field Trial Results for 5G Low Latency Scenario

Through enabling the IT and cloud computation capacities at Radio Access Network (RAN), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) makes it possible to deploy and provide services locally. Therefore, MEC becomes the potential technology to satisfy the requirements of 5G network to a certain extent, due to its functions of services localization, local breakout, caching, computation offloading, network context information exposure, etc. Especially, MEC can decrease the end-to-end latency dramatically through service localization and caching, which is key requirement of 5G low latency scenario. However, the performance of MEC still needs to be evaluated and verified for future deployment. Thus, the concept of MEC is introduced into 5G architecture and analyzed for different 5G scenarios in this paper. Secondly, the evaluation of MEC performance is conducted and analyzed in detail, especially for network end-to-end latency. In addition, some challenges of the MEC are also discussed for future deployment.