Availability assessment of SDN-ICN service for multi-access edge computing

Traffic on mobile and wireless networks has seen exponential growth in the last decade. With the advent of the fifth-generation (5 G) cellular technology, there is a strict requirement to ensure system availability, capacity, and reliability to provide operation services that work through wireless network mechanisms. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an appropriate approach for wireless access networks as such a technology. It provides support at the edge, encompassing the Mist, Fog, and Cloudlet paradigms. Additionally, software-defined networking (SDN) can enhance network performance and promote flexibility to support computation offloading and network slices. Therefore, stochastic models are important for designing MEC systems because they enable distinct arrangements to assess availability before implementing the real system. Thus, this paper presents a hierarchical modeling approach based on continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC), stochastic Petri nets (SPN), and reliability block diagrams (RBD) to assess the availability of an MEC system that adopts SDN for information-centric networks (ICN) context. Case studies demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed approach, in which results indicate system downtime can be reduced up to 97.52% using the conceived models to assess distinct redundancy techniques.