MEC-aware Cell Association for 5G Heterogeneous Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes MEC-aware cell association rules for 5G HetNets, demonstrating significant latency reduction in task offloading scenarios compared to traditional radio-only methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MEC-aware cell association approach that jointly exploits radio and processing resources for improved 5G network performance.

Findings

Nearly 60% latency reduction achieved

MEC-aware association outperforms radio-only methods

Enhances resource utilization in 5G HetNets

Abstract

The need for efficient use of network resources is continuously increasing with the grow of traffic demand, however, current mobile systems have been planned and deployed so far with the mere aim of enhancing radio coverage and capacity. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable anymore, as 5G communication systems will have to cope with huge amounts of traffic, heterogeneous in terms of latency among other Qualityof- Service (QoS) requirements. Moreover, the advent of Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) brings up the need to more efficiently plan and dimension network deployment by means of jointly exploiting the available radio and processing resources. From this standpoint, advanced cell association of users can play a key role for 5G systems. Focusing on a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), this paper proposes a comparison between state-of-the-art (i.e., radio-only) and MEC-aware cell association rules, taking the scenario of task offloading in the Uplink (UL) as an example. Numerical evaluations show that the proposed cell association rule provides nearly 60% latency reduction, as compared to its standard, radio-exclusive counterpart.