QoE analysis of NFV-based mobile edge computing video application

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides mobile and cloud computing capabilities within the access network. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) leverages standard IT Virtualization technology to decouple the network functions from the underlying physical infrastructure. Basing on the ICT demand, MEC can be consolidated into NFV, as a network element within access network. This paper presents an architecture of NFV-based MEC platform and analyzes its Quality of Service (QoS) compared with the remote servers (Shenzhen and Qingdao). Then, this paper measures the Quality of Experience (QoE) of HTTP videos deployed in the servers. The result shows MEC can offer a service environment with higher bandwidth, which supports 10-fold gains, and ultra-low latency, jitter and packet loss rate. Moreover, along with the higher resolution and bitrates, the range of the video QoE improvement on this platform rises compared with the remote servers. In a word, the NFV-based MEC can achieve better performance than the remote servers.