MECM2M: An MEC Based M2M System Considering Mobile Nodes as Compute Servers

In addition to stationary sensors/actuators (nodes), mobile nodes such as vehicles and smartphones are connected to M2M (Machine-to-Machine) systems. Some M2M systems take into account node mobility, while some M2M systems regard vehicles as compute servers. N one of them, however, handle the mobility of nodes that act as compute servers. This paper proposes an MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) based M2M system called MECM2M, which can handle the mobility of nodes acting as sensors/actuators and compute servers. The design policy of MECM2M is analogous to that of the Internet. The Internet provides two fundamental services: reliable byte stream and unreliable datagram. How data is used is up to applications. MECM2M provides M2M applications with three fundamental services as the M2M services: area-based data acquisition, node-based data acquisition, and node-based action instruction. How sensing data is used is up to M2M applications. MECM2M introduces the virtual nodes as digital twins in the virtual space for the physical nodes. The virtual nodes conceal differences from the physical nodes and provide a uniform interface. The relation among the virtual nodes, the physical nodes, and the locations of the physical nodes is managed by a domain ontology called Onto- Mecm2m,which enables effective processing of the three fundamental services. The evaluation results on an MECM2M emulator show that the response times of the three fundamental services satisfy the latency constraints, i.e., 100 ms, defined in an ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) document.