NSEN: Improving Session Efficiency in Distributed MEC Networks

ABSTRACT6G technology is expected to transform communications by allowing the Internet of Everything, representing a huge advance in 2030. While B5G has not yet been established, various nations are actively working on 5G, but certain research groups are presently devoting their attention to the creation of 6G technologies. The upcoming 6G networks promise higher quality of service (QoS) features, including virtual reality and holographic communications. Multi‐Access Edge Computing (MEC) and, in particular, the offloading idea are key components of 6G innovation that enable resource‐intensive application design. If the wireless link used for computational offloading is inefficient, MEC's true potential can be impeded. Intelligent beamforming and MEC have garnered attention recently. Systematically optimizing the wireless communication environment, these developments improve connectivity between user equipment (UE) and base station (BS). By increasing the electrical charge of the reflectable signal, intelligent beamforming increases the range and efficacy of Back Communication. Particularly, this study assesses how well the MEC structure performs in urban microcellular settings when intelligent beamforming is used in communications. It has been demonstrated that the use of Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) greatly reduces spectrum and energy usage. This study's results are implemented in Python software. Our suggested strategy shows better latency compared to other optimization methods and shorter task completion times than traditional methods. When compared to conventional techniques, the suggested MEC‐enabled network showcasing lower latency (4.9 ms) and efficient network congestion management and task completion time (30 ms) demonstrates a significant performance. These results highlight how intelligent beamforming and MEC have a lot of potential to shape the architecture of 6G networks in the future.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) can provide the intelligent platform or environment for services with the requirements of lower latency, higher bandwidth, and higher computation complexity, thereby attracting more attention in the future network. Intuitively, MEC can be applied to 4G and 5G mobile networks respectively, however the corresponding MEC architectures will be entirely different because of the difference between 4G and 5G network architectures. Therefore, this paper firstly presents the 4G MEC architecture and deeply discusses the existing problems in field trials and future deployment, e.g. charging, lawful interception, etc. Considering the above problems, the 5G MEC integrated architecture is proposed in this paper, which takes the network and service functions into account simultaneously. Meanwhile, the network function, especially for the traffic offloading mechanism, is emphatically analyzed and discussed. In addition, some suggestions are also presented for promotion of 5G MEC.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technology to facilitate efficient vehicular applications, such as autonomous driving, path planning and navigation. By offloading tasks from vehicles to MEC servers (MECSs), the MEC system can facilitate computation-intensive applications with hard latency constraints in vehicles with limited computing resources. However, owing to the mobility of vehicles, the vehicles are not evenly distributed across the MEC system. Therefore, some MECSs are heavily congested, whereas others are lightly loaded. If a task is offloaded to a congested MECS, it can be blocked or have high latency. Moreover, service interruption would occur because of the high mobility and limited coverage of the MECS. In this paper, we assume that the task can be divided into a set of subtasks and computed by multiple MECSs in parallel. Therefore, we propose a method of task migration with partitioning. To balance loads, the MEC system migrates the set of subtasks of tasks in an overloaded MECS to one or more underloaded MECSs according to the load difference. Simulations have indicated that, compared with conventional methods, the proposed method can increase the satisfaction of quality-of-service requirements, such as low latency, service reliability, and MEC system throughput by optimizing load balancing and task partitioning.

Multi access edge computing (MEC) is an extension of 5G network on the edge side. Its network characteristics of high bandwidth and low delay provide necessary guarantee for the extreme user experience of VR (virtual reality). At the same time, the distributed architecture of 5g MEC network and the fast data exchange capability between nodes provide the hardware foundation for VR application marginalization deployment and equipment mobility access. Considering the cost and experience of VR, this paper first analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of VR based on traditional hardware architecture, and then describes the benefits of MEC on VR cost and experience. Finally, taking VR live video scene as an example, the key technologies of VR based on MEC are described.

In recent years, AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) applications have received lots of attention since it exploits widely deployed IoT devices to collect data and perform an action while leveraging AI to obtain knowledge and insights. When deploying AIoT in 5G networks, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is appropriate for enabling local management of IoT devices and computation of machine learning (ML) algorithms. Facing the multitude of threats in the ML data layer, IoT service layer, and 5G communications layer, MEC should enable corresponding detection and mitigation schemes to protect AIoT applications. In this article, we examine the existing security solutions located in each layer and discuss the interrelated challenges. For example, a network-traffic-based IDS solution in MEC might capture IoT malware but fail to identify a growing file-less attack. We suggest that firmware emulation in IoT endpoint should be included to provide system-level behaviors to network-based detectors in MEC so that file-less attacks can be distinguished. The potential of a backdoor attack aiming to poison data or corrupt ML models cannot be ignored in AIoT applications, and a corresponding detector should be implemented in MEC. Due to the rise of low-cost Software-Defined Radio (SDR), malicious attacks using rogue base stations (BSs) have become more popular. It implies that security protection at MEC in the communications layer is necessary. This article, therefore, proposes a novel platform, M3Inspector, where inspectors located in mobiles and AIoT machines collect information from surrounding BSs and provide them to MEC. MEC determines the rogue BS and makes a notification to users subscribing to the local service. A realistic 5G experimental platform with rogue BSs is developed. The results demonstrate that attack detection and mitigation can be implemented in the MEC paradigm to significantly improve the security protection of AIoT from the perspectives of rogue BS attacks and file-less attacks.

Optimizing the energy consumption of an MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing) system is a crucial challenge for operation cost reduction and environmental conservation. In this paper, we address an MECS (MEC Server) sleep control problem that aims to reduce the energy consumption of the system while providing users with a reasonable service delay by adjusting the number of active MECSs according to the load imposed on the system. To tackle the problem, we identify two crucial issues that influence the design of an effective sleep control technique and propose methods to address each of these issues. The first issue is accurately predicting the system load. Changes in system load are spatio-temporally correlated among MECSs. By leveraging such correlation information with STGCN (Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network), we enhance the prediction accuracy of task arrival rates for each MECS. The second issue is rapidly selecting MECSs to sleep when the load distribution over an MEC system is given. The problem of choosing sleep MECS is a combinatorial optimization problem with high time complexity. To address the issue, we employ a genetic algorithm and quickly determine the optimal sleep MECS with the predicted load information for each MECS. Through simulation studies, we verify that compared to the LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)-based method, our method increases the energy efficiency of an MEC system while providing a compatible service delay.

Various real-time, latency-sensitive, and high-speed mobile applications are evolving as 5G applications. These applications are realized using Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies in the 5G system. MEC platform, MEC service, and MEC application are the main components of an MEC Framework. NFV Orchestrator, Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM), and virtualization technologies such as Virtual Machines (VM) and Containers are the main pillars of the NFV technology. In this paper, we study the impact of the virtualization technologies in the deployment of the MEC framework and its components while. We also study the impact of virtualization technologies on NFV and MEC KPIs such as onboarding time, instantiation time, MEC service and application response times. The experiments and its analysis show that containers perform better than VM to instantiate/terminate MEC components in the NFV framework. The observed MEC service KPIs show that the edge application’s performance will be improved to meet the QoE of the applications irrespective of the virtualization technology used. These results can be used as a reference while deploying the MEC components based on their granular functionalities.

Efficient administration of computing resources in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) networks is a very active research topic. Task sharing in particular, is one of the capital problems with respect to MEC architectures although is mostly addressed from the end-user standpoint. Moreover, standard MEC frameworks do not consider task sharing schemes for computing servers at the edge level even though mechanisms of this kind could increase the utilization of resources in MEC setups. The integration of blockchain technologies into multi server cloud and edge computing solutions has started to gain steam in recent times, largely in part for its potential to enhance the functionality, security, and privacy of cloud-based architectures. In this context, this paper presents a task sharing mechanism for MEC servers with precedent-dependent tasks based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain platform that provides a light-weight and distributed interaction playing field for the servers that mitigates the security and privacy concerns related to the collaboration scheme. For sharing tasks among the servers, the call dependencies of the tasks for a user application are captured by a control-flow graph and an optimization problem is formulated to obtain the allocation of tasks. Numerical results on the performance of the proposed task sharing mechanism are presented.

In recent years, eXtended Reality (XR) applications have been widely employed in various scenarios, e.g., health care, education, manufacturing, etc. Such application are now easily accessible via mobile phones, tablets, or wearable devices. However, such devices normally suffer from constraints in terms of battery capacity and processing power, limiting the range of applications supported or lowering Quality of Experience. One effective way to address these issues is to offload the computation tasks to the edge servers that are deployed at the network edges, e.g., base stations or WiFi access point, etc. This communication fashion, also named as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), is proposed to overcome the limitations in terms of long latency due to long propagation distance of traditional cloud computing approach. XR devices, that are limited in computation resources and energy, can then benefit from offloading the computation intensive tasks to MEC servers. However, as XR applications are comprised of multiple tasks with variety of requirements in terms of latency and energy consumption, it is important to make decision whether one task should be offloaded to MEC server or not. This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning-based offloading scheme for XR devices (DRLXR). The proposed scheme is used to train and derive the close-to optimal offloading decision whereas optimizing a utility function optimization equation that considers both energy consumption and execution delay at XR devices. The simulation results show how our proposed scheme outperforms the other counterparts in terms of total execution latency and energy consumption.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) promises to deliver localized computing power and storage. Coupled with low-latency 5G radio access, this enables the creation of high added-value services for mobile users, such as in-vehicle infotainment or remote driving. The performance of these services as well as their scalability will however depend on how MEC will be deployed in 5G systems. This paper evaluates different MEC deployment options, coherent with the respective 5G migration phases, using an accurate and comprehensive end-to-end (E2E) system simulation model (exploiting Simu5G for radio access and Intel CoFluent for core network and MEC), taking into account user-related metrics, such as response time or MEC latency. Our results show that 4G radio access is going to be a bottleneck, preventing MEC services from scaling up. On the other hand, the introduction of 5G will allow a considerable higher penetration of MEC services.

This study focuses on the security of 5G mobile network major technology called Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and its susceptibility to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The goal of the research is to address the effects of DDoS attacks and implement effective mitigation techniques. Several supervised Machine Learning (ML) techniques, which include Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbour, Logistics Regression, and Blending/Stack Model, are evaluated using multiple performance metrics such as accuracy, detection/recall, F1-Measure, Matthew’s correlation coefficient, Receiver Operating Characteristic, and Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic. According to literature, ML algorithms achieve the best performance in mitigating DDoS attacks, therefore, they can be optimized to enhance their effectiveness. The research provides an overview of the existing mitigation schemes in the MEC and proposes a DDoS mitigation scheme. The findings show that hybrid models outperformed traditional ML models. Among the mitigation techniques evaluated, RF proved to be the most effective in mitigating DDoS attacks in MEC.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a new 5G enabling technology proposed to reduce latency by bringing cloud computing capability closer to IoT and mobile device users. MEC may be prone to unreliable communication as a result of deadlock during resource provisioning. Deadlock may occur due to a huge number of devices contending for a limited amount of resources if adequate measures are not put in place. It is crucial to eradicate deadlock while scheduling and provisioning of resources on MEC to achieve highly reliable and available system. In this paper, a deadlock avoidance resource provisioning algorithm is proposed for Industrial IoT devices using MEC platforms to ensure the higher reliability of network interactions. The proposed scheme incorporates a banker’s resource-request algorithm using software-defined networking to reduce communication overhead. Simulation Results have shown that system deadlock can be prevented by applying the proposed algorithm which ultimately leads to a more reliable network interaction between mobile stations and MEC platforms.

5G ecosystems will benefit significantly from Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). While NFV allows for dynamical deployment of virtualized network functions, MEC allows applications to be deployed close to mobile users, thus reducing latency. When used together, NFV and MEC bring flexibility and enhanced performance to meet the user’s demand. However, to increase service availability and maximize the convenience of MEC users, an MEC framework has to interface with multiple NFV orchestrators to utilize running network functions in an efficient manner. We introduce in this demonstration APMEC, a framework addressing the above two challenges. Via a combination of an interactive GUI, KPI views and a live-demo setup, we will showcase the advanced features of the framework.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is gaining momentum as it is considered as one of the enablers of 5G ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (uRLLC) services. MEC deploys computation resources close to the end user, enabling to reduce drastically the end-to-end latency. ETSI has recently leveraged the MEC architecture to run all MEC entities, including MEC applications, as Virtual Network Functions (VNF) in a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environment. This evolution allows taking advantage of the mature architecture and the enabling tools of NFV, including the potential to apply a variety of service-tailored function placement algorithms. However, the latter need to be carefully designed in case of MEC applications such as uRLLC, where service access latency is critical. In this paper, we propose a novel placement scheme applicable to a MEC in NFV environment. In particular, we propose a formulation of the problem of VNF placement tailored to uRLLC as an optimization problem of two conflicting objectives, namely minimizing access latency and maximizing service availability. To deal with the complexity of the problem, we propose a Genetic Algorithm to solve it, which we compare with a CPLEX implementation of our model. Our numerical results show that our heuristic algorithm runs efficiently and produces solutions that approximate well the optimal, reducing latency and providing a highly-available service.

With the advancements in 5G technology, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has always been at the forefront due to its ability to provide additional computational power with reduced network latency compared to cloud computing. Most applications from the Vehicle to Everything (V2X) and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) domains are stringent in latency requirements, for which MEC is an excellent enabler. As per MEC architecture, MEC applications can leverage the benefits of storing essential information as a part of MEC services to further reduce the latency. In this work, we enhance an in-house 5G emulation framework by integrating it with ETSI MEC Location Service API for supporting various ITS use cases. We demonstrate the use case of providing proximity alerts to the drivers using SUMO platform and a mobile application.