Introducing mobile edge computing capabilities through distributed 5G Cloud Enabled Small Cells

Current trends in broadband mobile networks are addressed towards the placement of different capabilities at the edge of the mobile network in a centralised way. On one hand, the split of the eNB between baseband processing units and remote radio headers makes it possible to process some of the protocols in centralised premises, likely with virtualised resources. On the other hand, mobile edge computing makes use of processing and storage capabilities close to the air interface in order to deploy optimised services with minimum delay. The confluence of both trends is a hot topic in the definition of future 5G networks. The full centralisation of both technologies in cloud data centres imposes stringent requirements to the fronthaul connections in terms of throughput and latency. Therefore, all those cells with limited network access would not be able to offer these types of services. This paper proposes a solution for these cases, based on the placement of processing and storage capabilities close to the remote units, which is especially well suited for the deployment of clusters of small cells. The proposed cloud-enabled small cells include a highly efficient microserver with a limited set of virtualised resources offered to the cluster of small cells. As a result, a light data centre is created and commonly used for deploying centralised eNB and mobile edge computing functionalities. The paper covers the proposed architecture, with special focus on the integration of both aspects, and possible scenarios of application.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Modeling and Implementation of 5G Edge Caching over Satellite

The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks have to deal with the high data rate and stringent latency requirements due to the massive invasion of connected devices and data-hungry applications. Edge caching is a promising technique to overcome these challenges by prefetching the content closer to the end users at the edge node’s local storage. In this paper, we analyze the performance of edge caching 5G networks with the aid of satellite communication systems. Firstly, we investigate the satellite-aided edge caching systems in two promising use cases: a) in dense urban areas, and b) in sparsely populated regions, e.g., rural areas. Secondly, we study the effectiveness of satellite systems via the proposed satellite-aided caching algorithm, which can be used in three configurations: i) mono-beam satellite, ii) multi-beam satellite, and iii) hybrid mode. Thirdly, the proposed caching algorithm is evaluated by using both empirical Zipf-distribution data and the more realistic Movielens dataset. Last but not least, the proposed caching scheme is implemented and tested by our developed demonstrators which allow real-time analysis of the cache hit ratio and cost analysis