Service Performance Tests on the Mobile Edge Computing Platform: Challenges and Opportunities

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a fast growing research area that may soon offer alternate service platforms to the clients over today’s Cloud Computing vendors (e.g., Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, etc.). And when the MEC services are ready and available, just like when Cloud Computing services were presented to the “On-Premises” server clients, despite available research data on compatibility, business owners and engineers will still have to practically implement and host their applications to the MEC servers, measure performance and be convinced first that MEC services can withstand the real users load without any performance degradation or disruption before finally making the switch. In this paper, we first discuss how today’s “On-Premises” server–clients conduct performance analysis before switching to the Cloud computing vendors, discuss the differences between the Cloud computing and MEC paradigms and then we try to envision the challenges and opportunities that may unfold for the performance tests on the future MEC service platforms.