Tutti: coupling 5G RAN and mobile edge computing for latency-critical video analytics

Mobile edge computing (MEC), as a key ingredient of the 5G ecosystem, is envisioned to support demanding applications with stringent latency requirements. The basic idea is to deploy servers close to end-users, e.g., on the network edge-side instead of the remote cloud. While conceptually reasonable, we find that the operational 5G is not coordinated with MEC and thus suffers from intolerable long response latency. In this work, we propose Tutti, which couples 5G RAN and MEC at the user space to assure the performance of latency-critical video analytics. To enable such capacity, Tutti precisely customizes the application service demand by fusing instantaneous wireless dynamics from the 5G RAN and application-layer content changes from edge servers. Tutti then enforces a deadline-sensitive resource provision for meeting the application service demand by real-time interaction between 5G RAN and edge servers in a lightweight and standard-compatible way. We prototype and evaluate Tutti on a software-defined platform, which shows that Tutti reduces the response latency by an average of 61.69% compared with the existing 5G MEC system, as well as negligible interaction costs.