Dynamic MEC Federation for AR-Based Smart Tourism: An SDN-Driven Energy Optimization Approach

The sixth-generation of mobile networks (6G), even at an early stage, is promising increased performance and the ability to accommodate new applications such as enhanced virtual and augmented reality in mobile environments. Due to the heavy computational load of such applications, these are split, moving the heavy processing to Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) datacenters closer to the end-users. However, as datacenters consume a considerable amount of power, the deployment of computational tasks must take into account the energy expenditure of each MEC and its underlying hardware. This paper presents a framework that leverages the concepts of MEC, Federation and Software-defined Networking (SDN) to enable an energy-aware service migration for Augmented Reality (AR) services in tourism applications, taking into consideration the varying power efficiencies of hardware in a federated MEC environment. The framework was implemented and tested in a carrier graded 5G network with results showing a 55% reduction in energy consumption while maintaining an acceptable quality of experience for the user.