Equalizing Access to Latency-Critical Services Based on In-Network Computing

We consider a portion of a RAN where end-users access services that imply the issue of a request through their associated base station (BS), followed by a computation on one of the available in-network computing facilities, and finally by the return of the result of the computation to the end-user who issued the request. The result must be returned within a specified latency deadline in order to be useful. Since not all BSs are equipped with a computing facility, some end-users may be disadvantaged, because they are associated with a BS from which the delay for a service request to reach a computing facility and for the results of the computation to come back is longer. Aiming at uniform end-user satisfaction, network operators should strive to on the one hand reduce differences in achieved end-user performance, while on the other obtain an efficient use of network resources. With simple analytical models we investigate the effectiveness of light network management algorithms, consisting in carefully choosing the routing probabilities of service requests toward one of the available computing facilities. We argue that at least some of such light network management algorithms should be compatible with the very stringent European Network Neutrality rules, and we show that they allow a good trade-off between overall resource utilization and equal performance experienced by end-users.