Analyzing MEC Architectural Implications for LTE/LTE-A

Lower-latency services are expected toward beyond 4G mobile networks; however, legacy 3G and 4G networks are now suffering from the mobile data surge. In this sense, pushing network services to the network edge has the potential to improve the traffic latency and user experience, as well as to offload Internet traffic. The network functions can be dynamically reassigned between edge and core nodes, offering flexibility and scalability. Even such Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) principles can highly benefit to the LTE/LTE-A network, but a detailed MEC architecture is not currently in place. To this end, in this research report, we analyze the impact of MEC on the current LTE/LTE-A systems, considering use-cases of interest, identied by ETSI. Finally, a modular MEC architecture is proposed, identifying the required radio network interfaces, application development services, and application programming interface.