ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the challenges, or rather sets of challenges, as decision and design problems that lie on three dimensions: infrastructure/operations/commercial. It introduces three main aspects that should be considered for the success of the adoption of multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology: deployment, operation, and charging/billing models for MEC. In fact, for some “MEC” deployments, for example, in enterprise scenarios where an IT cloud is attached to existing enterprise networks and only existing IT applications need to be supported, this is sufficient. In considering MEC in 5G networks, the chapter focuses on how MEC integrates with the user-plane function and the service-based architecture components of the control place part of the core network. The serving gateway is then enhanced to support breakout via network-specified traffic filters. The 5G network architecture solves many of the challenges of integrating an edge cloud with the mobile core and accessing internal mobile core information needed to provide MEC services.
