Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey on Architecture and Computation Offloading

Technological evolution of mobile user equipment (TIEs), such as smartphones or laptops, goes hand-in-hand with evolution of new mobile applications. However, running computationally demanding applications at the TIEs is constrained by limited battery capacity and energy consumption of the TIEs. A suitable solution extending the battery life-time of the TIEs is to offload the applications demanding huge processing to a conventional centralized cloud. Nevertheless, this option introduces significant execution delay consisting of delivery of the off loaded applications to the cloud and back plus time of the computation at the cloud. Such a delay is inconvenient and makes the offloading unsuitable for real-time applications. To cope with the delay problem, a new emerging concept, known as mobile edge computing (MEC), has been introduced. The MEC brings computation and storage resources to the edge of mobile network enabling it to run the highly demanding applications at the TIE while meeting strict delay requirements. The MEC computing resources can be exploited also by operators and third parties for specific purposes. In this paper, we first describe major use cases and reference scenarios where the MEC is applicable. After that we survey existing concepts integrating MEC functionalities to the mobile networks and discuss current advancement in standardization of the MEC. The core of this survey is, then, focused on user-oriented use case in the MEC, i.e., computation offloading. In this regard, we divide the research on computation offloading to three key areas: 1) decision on computation offloading; 2) allocation of computing resource within the MEC; and 3) mobility management. Finally, we highlight lessons learned in area of the MEC and we discuss open research challenges yet to be addressed in order to fully enjoy potentials offered by the MEC.