In-lab Testbed for Mobile Edge Caching with Multiple Users Access

Abstract

Mobile Edge Caching (MEC) has already become a promising technology. In the coming years, the importance of edge caching will continue to rise, as the volume of streaming traffic and the number of user requests for video contents are rapidly growing. MEC is gradually becoming the preferred choice for supporting the large-scale network infrastructure and the data intensive applications. MEC is characterized by deploying cache functions at the edge of the network, i.e. close to the end users. The proper deployment of caching functions is essential in the design process. A low-cost and scalable testbed is desired for engineers and researchers in order to verify various advanced MEC technologies.This paper introduces an in-lab testbed of MEC network platform based on the open source OpenAirInterface (OAI) system. Caching functions are implemented on multiple edge devices in the LTE emulation platform. The MEC technology has been evaluated and analyzed with multiple users access. The test results illustrate the MEC benefits including reduced latency for real-time applications, more efficient use of bandwidth and storage resources. The open source feature of our proposed testbed provides researchers with opportunity of extension according to their requirements.