Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Core/Periphery-based Network-oriented Mixed Reality Services

Many new network-oriented services have been developed in recent years, and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been standardized to improve the responsiveness of services. When deploying services in a MEC environment, it is necessary to consider a service structure that can flexibly switch service behaviors to meet various user requests and that can change service behaviors according to the real-world environment at a low implementation cost. In this paper, we introduce a core/periphery structure for service components, which is known as a model for flexible behavior in biological systems, and design and implement a network-oriented mixed reality service based on this structure. We investigate what kinds of functions should be developed to accommodate user requests in conjunction with various types of devices and real-world environments in which users and devices are located. To utilize the flexibility of a core/periphery structure, we regard core functions as those whose behaviors remain unchanged even when there are changes in user requests or the environment. In contrast, peripheral functions are those whose behaviors can change under such circumstances. Experiments reveal that implementation costs are reduced while retaining increases in service response time to less than 31 ms. These results show that taking advantage of a core/periphery structure allows appropriate division of service functions and placement of functions in a MEC environment, with only small penalties on latency and at a low implementation cost.