The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently advanced from an experimental technology to what will become the backbone of future customer value for both product and service sector businesses. This underscores the cardinal role of IoT on the journey toward the fifth generation of wireless communication systems. IoT technologies augmented with intelligent and big data analytics are expected to rapidly change the landscape of myriads of application domains ranging from health care to smart cities and industrial automations. The emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network, hence providing real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources. IoT is identified as a key use case of MEC, given MEC’s ability to provide cloud platform and gateway services at the network edge. MEC will inspire the development of myriads of applications and services with demand for ultralow latency and high quality of service due to its dense geographical distribution and wide support for mobility. MEC is therefore an important enabler of IoT applications and services which require real-time operations. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview on the exploitation of MEC technology for the realization of IoT applications and their synergies. We further discuss the technical aspects of enabling MEC in IoT and provide some insight into various other integration technologies therein.
Major interest is currently given to the integration of clusters of virtualization servers, also referred to as ‘cloudlets’ or ‘edge clouds’, into the access network to allow higher performance and reliability in the access to mobile edge computing services. We tackle the edge cloud network design problem for mobile access networks. The model is such that the virtual machines (VMs) are associated with mobile users and are allocated to cloudlets. Designing an edge cloud network implies first determining where to install cloudlet facilities among the available sites, then assigning sets of access points, such as base stations to cloudlets, while supporting VM orchestration and considering partial user mobility information, as well as the satisfaction of service-level agreements. We present link-path formulations supported by heuristics to compute solutions in reasonable time. We qualify the advantage in considering mobility for both users and VMs as up to 20 less users not satisfied in their SLA with a little increase of opened facilities. We compare two VM mobility modes, bulk and live migration, as a function of mobile cloud service requirements, determining that a high preference should be given to live migration, while bulk migrations seem to be a feasible alternative on delay-stringent tiny-disk services, such as augmented reality support, and only with further relaxation on network constraints.