MEC & MIMIK, one plus one equals eleven

The purpose of this white paper is to describe an enhanced approach to Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). The new approach enables end-devices to act as server nodes in close collaboration with MEC.

We first review the client/server software architecture and its evolution to microservice architecture. We will then illustrate the benefits of the new approach where all connected nodes on the network can act as cloud servers. This new approach keeps the separation between network, service, and application layers while providing each layer with contextual awareness of other layers for efficiency and optimization.

For the purpose of this document, we refer to the existing ETSI’s MEC and 3GPP’s SA6 architecture as “network-MEC”. We also introduce the concept of “hybrid-MEC” where enddevices are included as server nodes as an integral part of MEC.

We will show that hybrid-MEC makes MEC more scalable, efficient, and financially feasible. We will also show that it can help improve data privacy and user experience when building cloud-native applications.