Design and Evaluation on Mobile Edge Caching Testbed

Abstract

Internet traffic is predicted to increase fast over the next years. A large portion of it will be generated by mobile video services. Such a data explosion puts higher requirements on the capacity of the mobile network. Deploying more bandwidth resources to increase the network capacity is one solution, but it also means high cost. Mobile Edge Caching (MEC) is a new solution put forward these years to deal with the drastic growth of video data by bringing the video resources close to users at the edge cache. Researches have been done on the design of MEC, and implementing it in an emulator is one of the ways to verify the design. An emulator can provide real-case protocol implementation and more credible results compared with simulator. This paper studies the LTE emulators available in the market and proposes an MEC testbed based on the OpenAirInterface platform. Two use cases of the testbed are demonstrated and their performances are evaluated separately.