Performance Evaluation of a Satellite Communication-Based MEC Architecture for IoT Applications

Abstract

New scenarios and use cases are raising following the birth of the fifth generation of mobile communications. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the main use cases which are growing, leading to a massive amount of data that need to be exchanged throughout the Internet. Satellite communication networks are essential in remote and isolated environments and can support fully connected environments by offloading the terrestrial infrastructure concerning delay-tolerant traffic flows. However, satellite network resources are limited and expensive, so they need to be carefully used in order to avoid waste and satisfy the required user performance. The multi-access edge computing (MEC) concept can be exploited in this context to allow data preprocessing at the edge, i.e., close to the users, so reducing the amount of data that has to traverse the backhaul satellite link and, in some cases, reducing data delivery times. This article analyses the performance of a satellite architecture in the IoT framework Manuscript

Design and implementation of an advanced MQTT broker for distributed pub/sub scenarios

“…Recent works already envision an interplay between MEC services and satellite networks based on the MQTT protocol [8]. Managing efficiently such a distributed system of MQTT brokers becomes key, also considering the large delays and unstable links generally involved in satellite communications.…”