Toward Edge Intelligence: Multiaccess Edge Computing for 5G and Internet of Things

To satisfy the increasing demand of mobile data traffic and meet the stringent requirements of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications such as smart city, healthcare, and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), the fifth-generation (5G) enabling technologies are proposed and utilized in networks. As an emerging key technology of 5G and a key enabler of IoT, multiaccess edge computing (MEC), which integrates telecommunication and IT services, offers cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the radio access network (RAN). By providing computational and storage resources at the edge, MEC can reduce latency for end users. Hence, this article investigates MEC for 5G and IoT comprehensively. It analyzes the main features of MEC in the context of 5G and IoT and presents several fundamental key technologies which enable MEC to be applied in 5G and IoT, such as cloud computing, software-defined networking/network function virtualization, information-centric networks, virtual machine (VM) and containers, smart devices, network slicing, and computation offloading. In addition, this article provides an overview of the role of MEC in 5G and IoT, bringing light into the different MEC-enabled 5G and IoT applications as well as the promising future directions of integrating MEC with 5G and IoT. Moreover, this article further elaborates research challenges and open issues of MEC for 5G and IoT. Last but not least, we propose a use case that utilizes MEC to achieve edge intelligence in IoT scenarios.

I. Introduction

The year of 2019 saw the arrival of the era of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks. Compared with 1G to 4G, the mission of 5G is much more diverse, aiming at supporting the rapid evolution of the Internet and the information-communications technology (ICT), which exhibits the following two aspects [1]: 1) in terms of functions, 5G is required to prop up communications, control, computing, and content delivery (4C) and 2) in terms of applications, 5G enables a wide range of emerging applications, such as mobile gaming, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), and factory automation, where unprecedented low latency and high access speed are required.