Edge-Assisted Congestion Control Mechanism for 5G Network Using Software-Defined Networking

In order to cope with explosive growth of data traffic which is associated with a wide plethora of emerging application and services that are expected to be used by both ordinary users and vertical industries, congestion control mechanism is considered to be vital. In this paper, we proposed a congestion control mechanism that could function within the framework of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). The proposed mechanism is aiming to make real time decision for selectively buffering traffic, while taking network condition and Quality of Service (QoS) into consideration. In order to support a MEC-assisted scheme, the MEC server is expected to locally store delay-tolerant data traffics until the delay conditions expire. This enables network to have better control over the radio resource provisioning of higher priority data. To achieve this, we introduced a dedicated function known as Congestion Control Engine (CCE), which can capture Radio Access Network (RAN) condition through Radio Network Information Service (RNIS) function, and use this knowledge to make real time decision for selectively offloading traffic so that it can perform more intelligently. Analytical evaluation results of our proposed mechanism confirms that it can alleviate network congestion more efficiently.