Application-Aware Traffic Redirection: A Mobile Edge Computing Implementation Toward Future 5G Networks

Abstract

With the development of network technology, there are billions of devices accessing resources and services on the cloud through mobile telecommunication network. A great number of connections and data packets must be handled by the mobile network. It not only consumes the limited spectrum resources and network bandwidth, but also reduces the service quality of applications. To alleviate the problem, the concept of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been proposed by European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) in 2014. MEC suggests to provide IT and cloud computing capabilities at the network edge to offer low-latency and high-bandwidth service. The architecture and the benefits of MEC have been discussed in many recent literature. But the implementation of underlying network is rarely discussed or evaluated in practice. In this paper, we present our prototype implementation of a MEC platform by developing an application-aware traffic redirection mechanism at edge network to reduce service latency and network bandwidth consumption. Our implementation is based on OAI, an open source project of 5G SoftRAN cellular system. To the best of our knowledge, it is also one of the few MEC solutions that have been built for 5G networks in practice.