Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC): a key enabler of end-to-end latency improvement for 5G communications

Abstract: The need for efficient use of network resources is continuously increasing with the grow of traffic demand, however, current mobile systems have been planned and deployed so far with the mere aim of enhancing radio coverage and capacity. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable anymore, as 5G communication systems will have to cope with huge amounts of traffic, heterogeneous in terms of space, time and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. At the same time, the advent of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) brings up the need to more efficiently plan and dimension network deployment, by jointly exploiting the available radio and processing resources at the edge of the access network. Thus, in the first part of the talk, with the aim of investigating advanced UE-cell association, focusing on a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), we propose a comparison between state-of-the-art (i.e., radio-only) and MEC-aware cell association rules, taking the scenario of task offloading in the Uplink (UL), as an example. Numerical evaluations show that the proposed cell association rule can provide up to 60% latency reduction, as compared to the traditional radio-exclusive cell association strategy. The second part of the talk concentrates on the role of MEC in supporting the dynamic proliferation of the V2X vertical segment. More specifically, considering the automotive sector, different Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) use cases have been identified by the industrial and research world, referring to infotainment, automated driving and road safety. A common characteristic of these use cases is the need to exploit collective awareness of the road environment towards satisfying performance requirements. One of these requirements is the End-to-End (E2E) latency when, for instance, Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) inform vehicles about their status (e.g., location) and activity, assisted by the cellular network. Focusing on a freeway-based VRU scenario, we argue that, in contrast to conventional, remote cloud-based cellular architecture, the deployment of MEC infrastructure can substantially prune the E2E communication latency. Our argument is supported by an extensive simulation-based performance evaluation, with delay breakdown and system modeling based on real-world network performance measurements.

Bio: Miltiadis C. Filippou was born in Athens, Greece in 1984. He received his Dipl. Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2007. Having completed his mandatory military service in 2011, he joined the Mobile Communications Department at EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France, where he contributed to EU-funded FP7 project SAPHYRE and French national project LiCoRNe and in 2014 he received his Ph.D. degree in Electronics and Telecommunications, affiliated to Telecom ParisTech. Between 2014 and 2015 he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Digital Communications (IDCOM), University of Edinburgh, U.K., where he conducted research for the FP7 project ADEL. Since November 2015 Miltiadis works as a Standards and Research Engineer at Intel Deutschland, GmbH in Neubiberg, Germany and since April 2017 he serves as Rapporteur of two ETSI MEC Work Items (MEC in NFV, V2X API – ongoing). Miltiadis has authored and co-authored more than 30 technical papers, which appear in top IEEE journals and flagship conference proceedings and he has also co-invented a number of US & international patents. He is a member of the IEEE and of the Technical Chamber of Greece. His current research interests include: 5G RAN design, multi-access edge computing (MEC), radio resource management, as well as V2X and industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications systems.