A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in Mobile Edge Computing, emphasizing joint radio and computational resource management, and discusses future research directions, standardization efforts, and practical applications to enable low-latency, energy-efficient mobile services.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MEC research, focusing on resource management techniques and outlining promising future directions for practical deployment.

Findings

Extensive research on joint radio and computational resource management in MEC.

Identification of promising directions like MEC deployment, caching, and privacy.

Discussion of standardization efforts and application scenarios.

Abstract

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.