Mobile Edge Cloud System: Architectures, Challenges, and Approaches

Mobile edge cloud (MEC) is a model for enabling on-demand elastic access to, or an interaction with a shared pool of reconfigurable computing resources such as servers, storage, peer devices, applications, and services, at the edge of the wireless network in close proximity to mobile users. It overcomes some obstacles of traditional central clouds by offering wireless network information and local context awareness as well as low latency and bandwidth conservation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of MEC systems, including the concept, architectures, and technical enablers. First, the MEC applications are explored and classified based on different criteria, the service models and deployment scenarios are reviewed and categorized, and the factors influencing the MEC system design are discussed. Then, the architectures and designs of MEC systems are surveyed, and the technical issues, existing solutions, and approaches are presented. The open challenges and future research directions of MEC are further discussed.