MEC Implementation in NFV Architecture Supporting 5G End-to-End Network Slicing

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) utilizes computing platforms in the proximity of end users to provide cloud-based services with low latency and high reliability. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduces network slicing to provide diverse network services in 5G networks and has been working with European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to standardize the integration of MEC with 5G to support network slicing. However, the realization of network slicing in MEC is still in early stage. All the existing studies on network slicing in MEC were based on 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC), which do not conform to the network slicing standard developed by 3GPP. This work extends our prior work on management and orchestration (MANO) framework for 5G end-to-end (E2E) network slicing by incorporating the support for MEC. Our contribution is twofold. We report our MEC implementation in NFV architecture using all open-source software. We also make the MEC support network slicing and integrate it into an E2E networking slicing framework. The experimental results show that our MANO framework efficiently deploys k8s clusters, MEC platforms, and E2E network slices with short deployment time and low CPU and memory usage. Furthermore, the round-trip time to access services provided by MEC is much shorter than that of core networks.