Exploitation of Mobile Edge Computing in 5G Distributed Mission-Critical Push-to-Talk Service Deployment

There is a growing interest in adapting mission critical public-safety communications from traditional private radio technologies toward 5G. The need for resiliency and strong delay requirements has resulted in mobile edge computing (MEC) emerging as a key technology to improve the deployment of public safety applications over the mobile network. This paper presents a non-standalone 5G ETSI MEC-based architecture for mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) services. The proposal suggests a hierarchical distributed MCPTT architecture that allocates the user plane at the edge, keeping the control plane (CP) centralized for synchronization and assistance purposes. The MEC architecture enables the deployment of low latency services, due to the proximity of functional servers to the end-user, releases user equipment from heavy workloads, and benefits from horizontal scalability to provide dynamic allocation of network resources at specific locations. The proposed architecture is also beneficial in an isolated E-UTRAN operation situation, where in the case of backhaul connection loss, local MCPTT services can be straightforwardly deployed within an isolated group of eNodeBs.