SDN-Based Service Mobility Management in MEC-Enabled 5G and Beyond Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The next-generation mobile cellular networks are dedicated to providing a valued and unique service experience by supporting ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), high throughput, and high availability. Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) is an emerging network solution that provides services and computing functions on edge nodes to provide users with a reliable and high-quality service experience. However, achieving satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) for diverse service requests in a mobile environment is challenging because of the densely deployed yet resource-constrained MEC servers. A solution to ensure continued service quality is to migrate the services according to the mobility of users. However, in a highly mobile environment such as vehicular communications, this may result in a repeated relocation of services, incurring high operational costs and poor utilization of network resources. Moreover, each service has its own set of communication requirements, such as delay and bandwidth. Meeting these requirements in a highly dynamic and complex vehicular environment is an exacting challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) concepts are leveraged in MEC to provide a unified control plane interface that performs effective network and service mobility management, to manage the heterogeneity of service requests within the resource-constrained MEC servers. We conducted various Proof-of-Concept (PoC) experiments in an overlapped vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networking environment to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed system that ensures interconnection and federation among distributed MEC servers and mobile networks.