Mission Critical Messaging Using Multi-Access Edge Computing

5th Generation (5G) mobile system is expected to support the requirements of mission critical communications for ultra reliability and availability, and very low latency. With the development of messaging and data transfer in mobile networks, mission critical communication users see more and more potential in data communications. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) that appears to be a key 5G component, to provide short messaging service at the network edge. The provided use cases illustrate the capabilities for transferring mobile originating and mobile terminating short messages to and from mission critical mobile edge applications. The data model describes the service resource structure and the Application Programming Interface definitions illustrate how the mobile edge applications can use the service. Some implementation aspects related to behavioral logic of the network and applications are provided. The performance analysis enables estimation of latency introduced by the service.