MADE: An MEC Supported Platform Independent and Version Agnostic Framework for Mobile Application Deployment

Mobile applications are increasingly preferred by business organizations to engage with their customers. However, traditional mobile application deployments face challenges to handle diversity in devices like model release dates, OS support, storage, computing, etc. These challenges are more prevalent in developing economies due to the higher costs of purchase/upgrades, leading to the resale and redistribution of older mobile devices. In addition, the end users may not follow the best practices for cyber security hygiene. This work presents a network-enabled Multi-access Edge Computing based novel framework MADE, for the mobile app ecosystem that is platform-independent, release-agnostic, and secure. MADE reduces compute and storage requirements on the user device by offloading the mobile application’s functionalities to the edge. The characteristics of the MADE framework are evaluated through multiple experiments in a 5 G test environment across diverse applications. Analysis of top mobile banking applications from the authors’ geography demonstrates that MADE is platform-independent, release-agnostic, and well-suited for transaction-based applications.