Vehicle Mobility Impact on Performance of Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising solution that enables limited devices to access external computing resources. This allows users to receive high-performance, low-latency applications while using their User Equipment (UE). MEC relies on servers which are close to the UE and can offer computing resources to UE applications. In a MEC system, low latency is achieved by the proximity of users to the physical resources serving them. However, MEC faces challenges, especially in scenarios where user mobility can disrupt the proximity between users and the physical resources serving them. When the user is moving in a car, this can lead to a challenging environment for applications which trust the MEC to get access to external computing resources with low latency. We investigate this scenario to assess the impact of vehicular mobility on MEC performance. In a realistic setup, we collect nearly 5,000 latency measurements of the path between UEs in a 5G network and evaluate the impact of user mobility on a potential MEC system. We show that distance and signal quality play an important role in the end-to-end latency experienced by the UE.