Mustafa Emara, Ph.D. student at the Institute of Communications, received a best student paper award for the paper “MEC-assisted E2E Latency Evaluations for C-V2X Communicationsat” the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC) which took place on June 18-21, 2018 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Through this work, we advocate for the deployment of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) at the cellular base stations, to alleviate the network-imposed latencies resulting from the conventional network architecture. The emergence of MEC will introduce computing capabilities at the edge of the network and will provide an open environment targeting low packet delays due to close proximity to end user. This represents a paradigm evolution of the network, allowing new vertical business segments as shown in Figure 1. MEC deployment for the automotive services is driven by both the need to have more processing power closer to the vehicles to guarantee the required latency. By doing so, users can benefit more from the new functionalities, leveraged via MEC, to better handle the big volume of data coming from vehicles and road side units, where dynamic allocation of  computational resources based on the users’ needs is conducted.

Figure 1 5G system with MEC deployment

Considering the automotive sector, different Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything use cases have been identified by the industrial and research world, referring to infotainment, automated driving and road safety between the vehicles, pedestrians and infrastructure, as shown in Figure 2. A common characteristic of these use cases is the need to exploit collective awareness of the road environment towards satisfying performance requirements. One of these requirements is the End-to-End (E2E) latency when, for instance, Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) inform vehicles about their status (e.g., location) and activity, assisted by the cellular network. We show in this work that, in contrast to conventional, remote cloud-based cellular architecture, the deployment of MEC infrastructure can substantially prune the E2E communication latency. Numerical simulations were conducted showing the gains provided by MEC deployment compared to the conventional network architecture, which labels this work as a valid proof of concept of MEC advantages for delay-intolerant vehicular use cases.

Figure 2 Envisioned 5G Vehicular to everything (V2X) system

EuCNC 2018 is the 27th edition of a successful series of technical conferences in the field of telecommunications, sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and  the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), and financially supported by the European Commission, focusing on communication networks and systems, and reaching services and applications. This work has been funded under the Horizon2020 E2E-aware Optimizations and advancements for the Network Edge of 5G New Radio (ONE5G) project (ICT-760809), which aims at inventing 5G New Radio Advancements to support a variety of vertical use cases, boost capacity and improve energy-efficiency both in dense urban and rural areas.

Figure 3 Best student paper award

Figure 4 Gala dinner event at EuCNC18. From left to right, Miquel Payaró (CTTC), Mustafa Emara (Intel Deutschland and TUHH), Mihael Mohorcic (Jozef Stefan Institute) and Mojca Volk (University of Ljubljana)