Performance evaluation of the effect of traffic decentralization with mobile edge computing

Abstract In the centralized architecture of traditional mobile cellular network, every traffic of mobile terminals has to traverse the centered network core and then deliver to the corresponding service mobile terminals. Since the traffic load is concentrated on the central network core, it is difficult to deliver the explosive amount of network traffic and guarantee latency requirements of diversifying applications. In order to solve this problem, the mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture that distributes the traffic load by locating the computing and caching server closer to the terminal is currently being developed. In this paper, the effect of distribution of mobile traffic with MEC is evaluated in terms of throughput enhancements and latency reduction. The simulations were conducted using Mininet to determine what performance gains can be obtained when applying the MEC architecture to the mobile cellular network. As a result, under the same link bandwidth condition, MEC architecture provides an increase in data rates of approximately 265% for high-quality video transmission and about 162% for low-quality video transmission, and shows the reduced delay of packet arrival times.