MEIX: Evolving Multi-Access Edge Computing for Industrial Internet-of-Things Services

The Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced advanced vertical use cases in many sectors such as smart factories and smart cities. Most of the use cases are managed by a cloud-based IoT service layer platform that may affect the quality of service due to network communication latency. The early concept of edge computing has proven significant results in scheduling lightweight tasks for edge nodes and highly computational resources for the cloud. To support latency-critical IoT services, we propose an interworking architecture between the IoT service layer platform and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) at the network edge. The core idea of our architecture is to virtualize and instantiate required IoT service functions to the edge of the network, close to IoT devices that need ultra-low latency and high bandwidth. The interworking architecture is designed based on two global standards: oneM2M for IoT and MEC for edge computing. We present MEIX, a system based on such standardized techniques, and show how it can support mission-critical IoT services at the edge nodes. MEIX introduces a novel component that enables running virtual IoT common service functions to support the interoperability of IoT platform and network functions on top of MEC-based systems.