Mobile Edge Computing Towards 5G: Vision, Recent Progress, and Open Challenges

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging technology in 5G era which enables the provision of the cloud and IT services within the close proximity of mobile subscribers. It allows the availability of the cloud servers inside or adjacent to the base station. The end-to-end latency perceived by the mobile user is therefore reduced with the MEC platform. The context-aware services are able to be served by the application developers by leveraging the real time radio access network information from MEC. The MEC additionally enables the compute intensive applications execution in the resource constraint devices with the collaborative computing involving the cloud servers. This paper presents the architectural description of the MEC platform as well as the key functionalities enabling the above features. The relevant state-of-the-art research efforts are then surveyed. The paper finally discusses and identifies the open research challenges of MEC.