Abstract
Next generation optical access networks have to cope with the contradiction between the intense computation and ultra-low latency requirements of the immersive applications and limited resources of smart mobile devices. In this chapter, after presenting a brief overview of the related work on multi-access edge computing (MEC), the authors explore the potential of full and partial decentralization of computation by leveraging mobile end-user equipment in an MEC-enabled FiWi-enhanced LTE-A HetNet, by designing a two-tier hierarchical MEC-enabled FiWi-enhanced HetNet-based architecture for computation offloading, which leverages both local (i.e., on-device) and nonlocal (i.e., MEC/cloud-assisted) computing resources to achieve low response time and energy consumption for mobile users. They also propose a simple yet efficient task offloading mechanism to achieve an improved quality of experience (QoE) for mobile users.