On the Edge of the Deployment: A Survey on Multi-access Edge Computing

Abstract

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) attracts much attention from the scientific community due to its scientific, technical, and commercial implications. In particular, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard convergence consolidates the discussions around MEC. Still, the existing MEC practical initiatives are incomplete in their majority, hardening or invalidating their effective deployment. To fill this gap, it is essential to understand a series of experimental prototypes, implementations, and deployments. The early implementations can reveal the potential, the limitations, the related technologies, and the development tools for MEC adoption. In this context, this work first brings a discussion on existing MEC initiatives regarding the use cases they target and their vision (i.e., whether they are more network-related or more distributed systems). Second, we survey MEC practical initiatives according to their strategies, including the ETSI MEC standard. Besides, we compare the strategies according to related limitations, impact, and deployment efforts. We also survey the existing tools making MEC systems a reality. Finally, we give hints to issues yet to be addressed in practice. By bringing a better comprehension of MEC initiatives, we believe this survey will help researchers and developers design their own MEC systems or improve and simplify the usability of existing ones.