Towards enabled industrial verticals in 5G: a survey on MEC-based approaches to provisioning and flexibility

Abstract

The increasing number of heterogeneous devicesconnected to the Internet, together with tight 5G requirementshave generated new challenges for designing network infras-tructures. Industrial verticals such as automotive, smart cityand eHealthcare (among others) need secure, low latency andreliable communications. To meet these stringent requirements,computing resources have to be moved closer to the user, fromthe core to the edge of the network. In this context, ETSIstandardized Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). However,due to the cost of resources, MEC provisioning has to be carefullydesigned and evaluated. This survey firstly overviews standards,with particular emphasis on 5G and virtualization of networkfunctions, then it addresses flexibility of MEC smart resourcedeployment and its migration capabilities. This survey exploreshow the MEC is used and how it will enable industrial vertical.