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Edge Computing and How It’s Evolving

Edge computing is an emerging paradigm leading to major transformation in the networking world. The prime advantages that edge computing offers are reduced latency, bandwidth optimizations, and faster processing of data which leads to a better user experience. All depends on how time-critical the application in question is. 

With COVID-19 and the way the work from home culture got popular — streaming applications used for edutech, the collaborative tools, online healthcare, live trainings, and of course the OTT platforms which were a savior for people socially disconnected due to being in home isolation or taking general COVID precautions — the criticality of edge could be very well seen. All these applications could survive these tough times since the networking infrastructures across the world were mature enough to offer really low latency to these applications. Because of this, edge computing played a pivotal role getting content closer to the real user. Edge use cases were no longer confined to public safety, military uses, or manufacturing sectors — edge had a way bigger role to play in the daily lives of people. This wasn't necessarily evident to a consumer directly, but the service providers offering them network or real-world applications had a huge dependency on these emerging networking techniques.

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UE Application Initiation and Offloading on MEC Deployments in a Standalone 5G Network

5G is a disruptive technology mandatorily needed to meet the capacity and performance requirements of future networks. Massive bandwidth needs and extremely low latency requirements, needed by burgeoning applications (like AI, IoT, AR/VR), require 5G to be facilitated by other emerging technologies like SDN/NFV and multi-access edge computing (MEC). By bringing the computing closer to the user, MEC promises to meet the desired latency and bandwidth constraints. Standardization bodies, like 3GPP (for 5G) and ETSI (for MEC), have been working towards streamlining the procedures for interworking of 5G core and MEC systems. The 5G and MEC specifications give an insight into the future integration strategy expected – making MEC work as a 5G application function to interact with the 3GPP 5G system for traffic steering and reception of mobility events. But a complete flow of information between MEC function entities and the 5G core network functions on application initiation and UE mobility seems to be missing at this point of time. This paper intends to dig into some of these interworking issues and explains the interactions between the participating entities during the complete application lifecycle.

Keywords — MEC (Multi-access edge computing), 5G (5th generation), UE application offloading, 5G application functions