MEC/Cloud Orchestrator to Facilitate Private/Local Beyond 5G with MEC and Proof-of-Concept Implementation

Area of Science:

• Telecommunications Engineering
• Computer Networking
• Cloud Computing

Background:

• 5G-Internet of Things (IoT) enables new services, with Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) crucial for Beyond 5G guarantees like low latency and high security.
• Virtualization across Radio Access Networks (RAN) to applications facilitates new entrants, termed Private/Local Telecom Operators, into the ecosystem.
• Previous work explored the business potential for these operators; this study addresses their MEC application management and deployment challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design a fully virtualized MEC 5G network architecture for local use cases.
• To propose an MEC/Cloud Orchestrator for intelligent application deployment.
• To verify the feasibility and performance of the proposed system through end-to-end (E2E) evaluation.

Main Methods:

• Designed a fully virtualized MEC 5G network architecture.
• Developed an MEC/Cloud Orchestrator for intelligent deployment selection.
• Implemented and tested the system on a Beyond 5G testbed for E2E performance evaluation.

Main Results:

• The proposed MEC orchestrator enables intelligent deployment of applications in virtual 5G networks.
• End-to-end performance evaluation on a Beyond 5G testbed verified system feasibility.
• The system demonstrated reduced latency and more stable throughput compared to conventional cloud services.

Conclusions:

• The designed architecture and MEC orchestrator are feasible for virtualized MEC 5G networks.
• The proposed approach effectively supports local use cases by optimizing MEC application deployment.
• This solution offers significant performance improvements, particularly in latency and throughput, for private and local telecom operators.