Autonomous Edge Resource Organization with Smallcell Integration in 5G

In the upcoming 5G era, many new use cases (e.g. emergency situations, crowded sports event coverage, etc.) are expected to be supported. Additionally, to improve latency and jitter, 5G is likely to support edge computing capabilities, e.g. in an NFV and MEC fashion. These features and requirements call for support for autonomous networking, where links, nodes and their services cannot be presumed permanent, but rather have to be dynamically used, when available and suitable. In this paper, we propose a new design framework, named Aerosmith, which provides autonomous edge resource organization with smallcell integration and topology handling. We motivate our design, explain the key architectural decisions and our prototype implementation, and provide initial evaluation results.