Transparent Access to 5G Edge Computing Services

The upcoming 5G telecommunication system is expected to provide high data rates and ultra-low latency to meet the challenging demands of future applications. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a central piece of the solution by providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network. In this paper, we argue that edge computing should be invisible to clients and should not require modifications in client applications. A prototype shows how requests to cloud services can be transparently redirected to the closest edge computing host by leveraging Software-Defined Networking, while still allowing to use the cloud as a fallback. In addition, we discuss how to scale our approach for large networks.