融合移动边缘计算的未来5G移动通信网络

摘要

未来5G移动通信网络面临移动流量暴涨,新型业务提出高回传带宽、低时延等挑战,移动边缘计算MEC有望解决上述问题,首先介绍MEC的网络框架结构及其在5G中的标准化进展,然后结合MEC的部署策略和未来5G网络架构,提出融合MEC的未来5G移动通信网络架构.从该架构可以看到,未来5G将是一个通信与多级计算协同的网络,所提架构可灵活、自适应地支持多种通信模式,同时可采用虚拟化技术实现通信、计算、存储资源的高效共享.面向通信与计算协同,融合MEC的5G网络在基础理论方面面临的主要挑战是网络容量分析,关键技术方面则包括通信与计算资源的协同优化、计算存储多播、节带化传输等.相关理论与技术亟需进一步的深入研究探讨,推动通信与计算融合发展.%Future 5G wireless networks are confronted with various challenges such as exponentially increasing mobile traffic and new services requiring high backhaul bandwidth and low latency.Integrating mobile edge computing (MEC) into 5G network architectures may be a promising solution.First of all,this paper introduces the functional framework of MEC systems.Then the standardization progress of MEC in 5G is presented.Supporting MEC,the functionalities of 5G core network are described in detail.Given MEC deployment strategies and the mobile network architectures of future 5G,a MEC coordinated 5G network architecture is proposed,which demonstrates that 5G will be a network featured by the coordination of communications and multilevel computing.The proposed network architecture can support various communication modes adaptively and enable the resource sharing efficiently with virtualization technologies.Some researches have been carried out on MEC coordinated 5G,such as basic theorems related to the 5G network capacity concerning both the communication and computing resources,and key technologies including the joint optimization of communication and computing resources,multicast based on computing and cache,and bandwidth-saving transmission.It can be seen that much more efforts need to be put on MEC coordinated 5G before the network can be fully understood.