Big Data and Machine Learning Driven Open5GMEC for Vehicular Communications

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging technology and an essential component of 5G networks to bring cloud services closer to users. That means data collection, storage, processing, computing, communication, and network control are implemented at network edges. MEC is expected to be able to satisfy a variety of delay-sensitive services and applications. On the other hand, the development of vehicles to everything (V2X) communication brings many requirements to future networks to guarantee full intelligence, automatic, and faster computation, management, and optimization to fulfill network QoS (quality of service) and QoE (quality of experience). To deal with those requirements, recently, software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), big data, and machine learning (ML) have been proposed as emerging technologies and the necessary tools for MEC and vehicular networks. This study aims to integrate those technologies to build a comprehensive architecture and an experimental framework for future 5G MEC called Open5GMEC. Moreover, the authors analyzed challenges and proposed relevant solutions for future vehicular communications in 5G networks.  Finally, based on this framework, we successfully implemented several powerful ML-based applications for V2X such as object detection, network slicing, and migration services, which are executed at Broadband Mobile Lab (BML), National Chiao Tung University (NCTU).