Workshop: Mobile Edge Communications MECOMM 2018

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Future mobile networking aims to support ultra low latency, context-related service offering, personalised service delivery and highly flexible and efficient resource management. One of the key approaches to meet these targets focuses on the introduction of virtualized compute and storage resources at the edge of the network, having closer proximity to mobile subscribers. This approach has the potential to reduce end-to-end latency and time-to-response, while increasing the flexibility and agility of allocating resources. The Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm takes this approach to facilitate computation/storage capabilities at the edge, with a particular focus on their interaction with applications and services. In a similar fashion, virtualisation brings advantages related with the flexible realization and management of network and application functionality on top of virtualized compute, storage and network resources. As a consequence a new promising landscape is being shaped, where key capabilities of resource virtualization and programmability foster the emergence of intelligent solutions at the edge of the network.

At the same time, the prospect of MEC is set to change several of the standard assumptions we make about the Internet. For instance, in a distributed storage and compute architecture it is not clear who owns what and therefore, who to trust when making use of the edge storage and compute components. This is in contrast to today’s landscape, where a few big stakeholders dominate the “Public Cloud”. Although getting more stakeholders involved could be a positive development in terms of user privacy, it requires extra research in order to guarantee security and establish a trusted computing environment.

MECOMM 2018 solicits papers that address aspects of the above areas with a main focus on facilitating communication solutions that enable dynamic and flexible edge architectures through joining concepts of softwarization and virtualization paradigms. Our workshop encourages papers that address cross-­layer research issues in any combination of these areas, bridging the gaps between network softwarization, virtualization and Cloud/Edge computing.

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