Performance Evaluation of Integrated Multi-Access Edge Computing and Fiber-Wireless Access Networks

With the widespread use of smart mobile devices, the exponential growth of mobile Internet traffic and newly emerging services, such as Internet of Things, virtual reality/augmented reality, and serious games, the network performance requirements for delay and bandwidth are increasing. The inherent long-distance propagation and possible network congestion of mobile cloud computing may lead to excessive latency, which cannot satisfy the new delay-sensitive mobile applications. The proximity of edge computing provides the possibility of low-latency access and raises increasing interest from non-mobile operators; therefore, edge computing faces a variety of access network technologies, including wired (fixed) and wireless (mobile) access. In this paper, we propose an integrated heterogeneous networking scheme for multi-access edge computing and fiber-wireless access networks that uses network virtualization to achieve the dynamic orchestration of the network, storage, and computing resources to meet diverse application demands. The global view and centralized control of the entire network and the unified scheduling of the resources in the scheme anticipate the convergence of various types of access networks and the edge cloud. The multipath transmission of the service flows is further combined as an instance of integrated edge cloud networking. An experimental testbed is established in the laboratory, and the performance of the multi-access edge computing and networking is evaluated to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the scheme. The results demonstrate that the scheme can effectively improve the network performance.