Consideration and Evaluation of Network Location and Communication Protocols Utilizing HTTP for Edge Computing

In recent years, Edge Computing has gained attention to alleviate the concentration of traffic in the cloud by processing large amounts of data on Edge servers closer to the data source. To realize this approach, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been proposed. MEC is expected to utilize the high-speed and large-capacity communication of 5G to offload computations to nearby the devices. To effectively utilize the computational resources of MEC, we have proposed a middleware called MEC-RM (MEC Resource Manager). MEC-RM has the advantage of transparently utilizing network-side resources and is possible to be deployed in various locations within a network. However, there are problems of lacking discussion and evaluation regarding the optimal location of MEC-RM in the network and the suitable communication protocol to be used by MEC-RM. To solve these problems, this study aims to clarify the appropriate location to be placed of MEC-RM, and to achieve the purpose, we evaluate both 5G and Wi-Fi communication packet and HTTP communication delays within a specific network architecture. The results show that the 5G communication is slower than the Wi-Fi. The latency caused by 5G communication is more than three network hops. Additionally, the communication delay using HTTP is less than 0.1 seconds, which is sufficient for the scenarios envisioned by MEC-RM.