MEC architectural implications for LTE/LTE-A networks

Towards 5G mobile networks, the low-latency and high-bandwidth services are highly anticipated; however, legacy 3G and 4G networks now suffers from the mobile data surge. In this sense, pushing network services to the network edge has the potential to improve the traffic latency, user experience, and offload Internet traffic. Although the LTE/LTE-A network can highly benefit from the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) principle, a detailed MEC architecture is not currently in place. In this work, we propose a modular architecture for the Mobile Edge Host that is ETSI compliant and describe the functional mapping of the architecture to LTE systems. Proof-of-concept demonstrations based on the OpenAirInterface (OAI), a software implementation of LTE/LTE-A systems, present significant benefits of adopting the MEC concept in data caching use case.