Transport Bottlenecks of Edge Computing in 5G Networks

Abstract

We consider bottlenecks of TCP throughput in scenarioswith edge clouds and 5G cellular networks. By numericalexamples from measurements in real networks, we show thatedge clouds indeed improve throughput but that several, nonnegligiblebottlenecks remain. We therefore devise a conceptwhere edge clouds connected directly to the radio access networkcan increase their transmission rates by relying on built in retransmissions(through quality of service features) and on thebuilt in user fairness (through per-user buffers and schedulerpolicies). We then return to the numerical examples and showthat our solution provides substantial gains and we conclude byidentifying and discussing the remaining bottlenecks.