Availability Evaluation of a Softwarized MEC

The evolution of cellular technology has raised concerns about the landscape of wireless networks, where is expected flexibility in our lives with the advent of Fifth-generation (5G) radio access. With new requirements and softwarized implementations, many novel services include ensuring the availability and enhancement of computational capacity, storage, and reliability, which are critical for addressing planning, operation, and content delivery challenges driven by 5G technology. These factors play pivotal roles in overcoming the planning challenges for radio access networks (RAN). At the forefront of this technological evolution is Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). This paradigm lends its support to radio access networks at the edge encompassing Mist, Fog, and Cloudlet architectures, operating closer to the end users. Software-defined Networks (SDN) are an essential technology for the evolution of edge system design. For this, the Stochastic models become indispensable to address the complexities of MEC systems and evaluate their availability. Therefore, this paper proposed a hierarchical evaluation using continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) and reliability block diagrams (RBD) to analyze the availability of a MEC SDN-based environment. Preliminary results show a steady-state availability of 93.41% with 577.16 hours of annual downtime, validated within a 95% confidence interval. Thus, hierarchical modeling techniques can ensure accuracy and avoid resource wastage in planning modern wireless networks.