5GArchitectureMECMobilityRRMSmall cellsTROPIC – Distributed computing, storage and radio resource allocation over cooperative femtocells

Introducing concept of Mobile Edge Computing via distributed computing capabilities collocated with base stations of mobile networks with joint management of communication and computation.

TROPIC is an Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The goals of TROPIC are aligned with objectives ICT-2011 1.1 “Future Networks (subtopic: Wireless and mobile broadband systems)” and ICT-2007.1.2 “Cloud Computing, Internet of Services and Advanced Software Engineering”. TROPIC is a consortium of 10 partners coordinated by UPC.
Femtocell networks are currently seen as the new communication paradigm for the ever-increasing ubiquitous wireless traffic demands. Being pervasive by nature, its proximity to the subscriber opens a new world of possibilities for the development of applications. Among them, cloud computing services demanded by smartphones could be moved from large server farms to HeNBs, provided that these are equipped with computational and storage resources, thus improving user experience on latency and download/upload speed.
TROPIC addresses this scenario by exploiting advanced MP2MP communications schemes, innovative virtualization procedures, and a cross-layer approach to the allocation of resources understood in a wide sense: radio, computational/storage capacity and energy.
TROPIC work programme includes the definition and characterization of the system level building blocks and their required interfaces for the implementation of a full system emulator and the development of a proof of concept platform.
http://www.ict-tropic.upc.edu/

Mobile Edge Computing, Small cells, Small cell cloud, Mobility management, Radio resource management

Major results and publications

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    Distributed Architecture of 5G Mobile Networks for Efficient Computation Management in Mobile Edge Computing
    5G Radio Access Network (RAN) - Centralized RAN, Cloud-RAN and Virtualization of Small Cells (H. Venkataraman, R. Trestian, eds.), CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, USA, .

    [BibTex]
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    Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey on Architecture and Computation Offloading
    IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, volume 19, no. 3, .

    [BibTex]
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    Path Selection Enabling User Mobility and Efficient Distribution of Data for Computation at the Edge of Mobile Network
    Computer Networks, volume 108, .

    [BibTex] [pdf] [doi]
  • and
    Cloud-aware Power Control for Real-time Application Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing
    Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, volume 27, no. 5, .

    [BibTex] [doi]

    Date:
    09/2012 – 04/2015
    Project no.:
    ICT-318784
    Funding:
    EC FP7
    Budget (6Gm):
    252k EUR
    PI (6Gm):
    Zdenek Becvar (WP leader)
    Team (6Gm):
    Pavel Mach, Jakub Dolezal, Michal Vondra, Jan Plachy
    Partners:
    UPC Barcelona, CEA Leti,...