APMEC: An Automated Provisioning Framework for Multi-access Edge Computing

• Main Authors: Doan, Tung V, Nguyen, Giang T, Kropp, Alexander, Fitzek, Frank H. P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 09-05-2018
• Subjects: Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1805.09251

Novel use cases and verticals such as connected cars and human-robot
cooperation in the areas of 5G and Tactile Internet can significantly benefit
from the flexibility and reduced latency provided by Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Existing frameworks
managing and orchestrating MEC and NFV are either tightly coupled or completely
separated. The former design is inflexible and increases the complexity of one
framework. Whereas, the latter leads to inefficient use of computation
resources because information are not shared. We introduce APMEC, a dedicated
framework for MEC while enabling the collaboration with the management and
orchestration (MANO) frameworks for NFV. The new design allows to reuse
allocated network services, thus maximizing resource utilization. Measurement
results have shown that APMEC can allocate up to 60% more number of network
services. Being developed on top of OpenStack, APMEC is an open source project,
available for collaboration and facilitating further research activities.