Extending the MEC Mobility Service to Support Cache Prefetching
Carlos M. Lentisco, Luis Bellido, Daniel González-Sánchez, Ignacio D. Martínez-Casanueva, David Fernández, Ignacio Soto · 2022
Multimedia streaming services can benefit from the capabilities that Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) platforms bring to networks. High availability of multimedia content at the edge of the network makes it possible to reduce both service disruptions and service latency. However, the network of edge caches needs to be synchronized to guarantee that the content is always available at the cache that is the closest to the user terminal location, especially after a cell handover. In this paper, the standard MEC application mobility service is extended to support cache prefetching based on mobility predictions. This prefetching mechanism allows to pre-store the multimedia content at a MEC site before the handover, in order to improve service latency and service continuity.