A Framework for MEC-Enhanced Small-Cell HetNet with Massive MIMO

In this article, we propose a framework for a multi-access edge computing-enhanced heterogeneous network employing massive MIMO transmission and small cells that is designed to mitigate interference, increase throughput, alleviate backhaul capacity pressure, and reduce signaling overhead. We design the information-centric transmission mechanism and discuss possible signal processing and transmission modes. We also demonstrate that channel state information can be pooled at a centralized MEC server, and precoding may be carried out cooperatively among cells to reduce intra-cell and inter-cell interference. A smart caching scheme is proposed to proactively cache content at appropriate base stations in anticipation of the best transmission mode to be used, thereby reducing latency from content retrieval. Moreover, our proposed scheme performs content scheduling to assign the same content requested by different users to the same intervals, eliminating some possible interference and simplifying precoding. Finally, research challenges within the proposed framework are discussed.