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.
Technological evolution of mobile user equipment (UEs), such as smartphones or laptops, goes hand-in-hand with evolution of new mobile applications. However, running computationally demanding applications at the UEs is constrained by limited battery capacity and energy consumption of the UEs. A suitable solution extending the battery life-time of the UEs 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 offloaded 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 UE 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.