A practical architecture for mobile edge computing

Recently, mobile broadband networks are focused on bringing additional capabilities to the network edge. For instance, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) brings storage and processing capabilities closer to the mobile user i.e., at the radio access network, in order to deploy services with minimum delay. In this paper, we propose a resource constrained cloud-enabled small cell that includes a MEC server for deploying mobile edge computing functionalities. We present the architecture with special focus on realizing the proper forwarding of data packets between the mobile data path and the MEC applications, based on the principles of SDN, without requiring any changes to the functionality of existing mobile network nodes both in the access and the core network segments. The significant benefits of adopting the proposed architecture are analysed based on a proof-of-concept demonstration for content caching application use case.