On-Site Evaluation of a Software Cellular Based MEC System with Downlink Slicing Technology

Abstract

MEC (MobilelMulti-access Edge Computing) has recently caught much attention for processing data in the vicinity of user equipment (UE) to reduce latency for real-time applications. One of the challenges of MEC is to reduce the cost of deploying computational resources near the cellular base stations. Recently, software implementation of cellular base stations is emerging as it allows colocation of access point functionalities and those of MEC within the same commodity hardware, e.g., using containers, thus facilitates deployment of MEC without incurring much cost. In this paper, we posit that one of the most significant challenges for realizing softwarized base stations with MEC capability is to enable resource isolation among slices, especially isolating low latency slice as the primary concern of MEC is to enable low-latency application. Our contributions are threefold. First, we define the architecture of MEC infrastructure in softwarized cellular network. Second, we measure the actual latency and throughput of on-site MEC in a softwarized cellular network. And at last, we propose a novel slicing method for softwarized base stations to isolate a low latency slice from a broadband one. Our evaluation shows that the proposed method enables reasonable resource isolation, achieving the same minimal latency even with a competing broadband slice as that without any other slice.