In recent years, the demand for further expansion of the capacity of wireless communication is increasing due to the drastic growth in the number of connected devices and the emergence of various service applications. Currently, the trend towards 5G system introduction in 2020 is becoming active. The typical usage scenarios of 5G have been identified as eMBB, mMTC, and URLLC. Meanwhile it is necessary to decrease traffic on the backhaul side and reduce the end-to-end latency. To address it, in the last few years, we have proposed the concept of mmWave overlaid heterogeneous cellular networks where mmWave small cell base stations are introduced into the conventional macro cells as shown in Fig.1. Moreover, we attempt to introduce a new concept based on the combination of ultra-broadband mmWave communications and multi-access edge computing (MEC) as a solution.
The mmWave Edge Cloud system architecture is shown in Fig.2. As an overview of this architecture, the cloud side applications are also deployed on the MEC side according to the application requirements and data traffic situations, and the users are controlled with out-of-band C-plane to be connected to the surrounding MEC application. To reduce the backhaul traffic and end-to-end latency, our architecture could be realized by forwarding (prefetching) data to an edge cloud based on users and network context information such as user position, network load, and data popularity, and enables the network to orchestrate its radio and MEC resources.
SAKAGUCHI & TRAN LAB
