NeiMEC: Automatically building neighbor relationship between mobile edge platforms in multi-access edge computing environment

Abstract

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a key technology towards achieving a 5G system. Via MEC technology, both the service latency and cost of the backhaul network can be decreased in 5G environments; however, the MEC servers work independently, without considering the status of other MEC servers, which may lead to some difficulties in meeting the 5G requirements defined by ITU-R. This paper proposes a novel architecture for multiple MEC servers, named NeiMEC, to define the neighbor relationship of multiple MEC servers. Via NeiMEC, the MEC servers can refer to the statistical information of neighbor MEC servers to apply an advanced content cache replacement policy when its content cache is full. The NeiMEC-based content cache replacement policy will improve the hit ratio of the contents (by up to 42%) above the hit ratio of systems that don't consider neighbor servers. Consequently, the latency of accessing service is improved.