Title: A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective,
Abstract: Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent
years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized
Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of
MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network
edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable
computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited
mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy
consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The
promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and
industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to
seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile
computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for
computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a
comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint
radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook
consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC
system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC,
as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate
the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent
standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application
scenarios.