From Megabits to CPU Ticks: Enriching a Demand Trace in the Age of MEC

All the content consumed by mobile users, be it a web page or a live stream, undergoes some processing along the way; as an example, web pages and videos are transcoded to fit each device's screen. The recent multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm envisions performing such processing within the cellular network, as opposed to resorting to a cloud server on the Internet. Designing a MEC network, i.e., placing and dimensioning the computational facilities therein, requires information on how much computational power is required to produce the contents needed by the users. However, real-world demand traces only contain information on how much data is downloaded. In this paper, we demonstrate how to enrich demand traces with information about the computational power needed to process the different types of content, and we show the substantial benefit that can be obtained from using such enriched traces for the design of MEC-based networks.