A MEC architecture for a better quality of service in an Autonomous Vehicular Network

Designing 5G networks and related applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cellular and autonomous vehicular networks (AVNET) is a challenge. Indeed, these networks are subjected to a number of constraints that play a crucial role in the network’s quality of service (QoS). Among these constraints, we have the management of computing, storage, bandwidth resources and low latency requirements. If in the past cloud computing has been used to avoid networks being affected by some of the previous constraints, that technology negatively affects the low latency requirements required by AVNETs for example. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a palliative solution to cloud computing. MEC aims to bring computing and storage resources from Cloud Data Center to Edge Data Center nearer to the User Equipment (UEs) in order to reduce the UEs’ requests latency for an improvement of the network’s QoS. Many MEC architectures have been proposed for AVNET. These solutions make use of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Service Function Chaining (SFC) or Network Slicing (NS) technologies. Some of these techniques combine partially these technologies while others do not. But to the best of our knowledge, none of them combines all these technologies to obtain a better QoS. In this paper, we combine the SDN, NFV, SFC and NS technologies to efficiently manage the MEC server resources for guaranteeing the QoS requirements in AVNETs. The QoS parameters we consider are latency, computing, storage and bandwidth resources. In that way, we first present a MEC server mathematical resource management model, then, we propose a new MEC architecture adapted to AVNETs that uses the aforementioned technologies also as the mathematical model we first present to manage the bandwidth, computing, and storage resources. The simulation results show that these resources are well managed, resulting to a low end to end latency for autonomous vehicles (AVs) requests executing on edge/cloud servers when the direct communication of AVs with cloud server takes long end to end delays, ensuring a better QoS for the AVNET.