Evaluation of Edge Technologies Over 5G Networks

The emerging technologies in the field of telecommunications have evolved into the paradigm of 5G. The 5G technology suggests that communication networks can become sufficiently flexible to handle a wide variety of network services from various domains. One of the aspects envisaged by 5G is the virtualization of small cells, which allows enhanced mobile edge computing capabilities, thus enabling network service deployment and management near the end user. This paper presents a cloud-enabled small cell architecture for 5G networks developed within the 5G-ESSENCE project. The paper demonstrates a set of experiments for different platform architectures in 5G, based on a prototype Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) Virtualized Network Function (VNF).