MUREN: delivering edge services in joint SDN-SDR multi-radio nodes

To meet the growing local and distributed computing needs, the cloud is now descending to the network edge and sometimes to user equipments. This approach aims at distributing computing, data processing, and networking services closer to the end users. Instead of concentrating data and computation in a small number of large clouds, many edge systems are envisioned to be deployed close to the end users or where computing and intelligent networking can best meet user needs. In this paper, we go further converging such massively distributed computing systems with multiple radio accesses. We propose an architecture called MUREN (Multi-Radio Edge Node) for managing traffic in future mobile edge networks. Our solution is based on the Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) architecture and its close interaction with Software Defined Networking (SDN), the whole jointly interacting with Software-Defined Radios (SDR). We have implemented our architecture in a proof of concept and tested it with two edge scenarios. Our experiments show that centralizing the intelligence in the MEC allows to guarantee the requirements of the edge services either by adapting the waveform parameters, or through changing the radio interface or even by reconfiguring the applications. More generally, the best decision can be seen as the optimal reaction to the wireless links variations