An Evaluation of the Communication Performance of MEC-Dependent Services in 5G Networks

Remote infrastructure is going to assist prospective mobile services, but requires reliable and efficient network resources. Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and cellular networks starting from the fifth generation (5G) are two of the enabling technologies that are necessary to meet strong service level requirements. When service constraints cannot be met all the time, the service may be malfunctioning or even impossible. Impact factors can be user mobility, the network architecture, flexible topology changes, and orchestration decisions. We discuss these challenges while considering the technical integration possibilities. Mainly, we develop a MEC network simulation with a 5G cellular network and user mobility. Our aim is to respect and focus on network conditions for MEC-dependent services and to generate performance indicators for an example task offloading application. We vary the available 5G resources, the number of involved MEC nodes, and application-level behavior like the offloaded task complexity, i.e., computing duration and offloading interval. Additionally, we examine connection-oriented and stateless communication. Our results show that a dense MEC network is able to improve round-trip time (RTT) and jitter in high-load situations and can have a positive impact on service availability and reliability.