MEC-based infotainment services for smart roads in 5G environments

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) provides cloud computing at the edge of the network. This technology is key for the automotive industry, due to the huge amount of data that are generated and need to be processed in heterogeneous environments with autonomous and connected cars. In addition to safety critical function, infotainment is also an important use case, due to its market potential. In this paper, we implemented a MEC-based infotainment service for smart roads in 5G environments, using a real MEC platform (OpenNESS) and a commercial-ready client-server application, where the server application (OverBrowser) provides a customized customer experience on the browser screen of any connected device. The implementation at the edge of this server application permitted to accelerate frequently accessed contents by improving the content transfer speed through the 5G network, and by reducing the latency and the backbone bandwidth usage. Performance tests (comparing edge vs remote configurations) showed an improvement of the Content load latency and reduction of Transport network data saving (or backbone bandwidth usage reduction) on multiple access of documents or data streams, such video contents.