Overbooking radio and computation resources in mmW-mobile edge computing to reduce vulnerability to channel intermittency

One of the key features of 5G roadmap is mobile edge computing (MEC), as an effective way to bring information technology (IT) services close to the mobile user. Moving computation and caching resources at the edge of the access network enables low latency and high reliability services, as required in many of the verticals associated to 5G, such as Industry 4.0 or automated driving. Merging MEC with millimeter wave (mmW) communications provides a further thrust to enable low latency and high reliability services, thanks to the high data rate of mmW links and the ability to handle interference through massive beamforming. However, mmW links are prone to blocking events, which could limit the effectiveness of the mmW-MEC deployment. To overcome blocking events and robustify mmW-MEC, in this paper we propose and analyze the performance of two strategies to overcome the effect of blocking: i) overbooking of computation and communication resources, based on the statistics of blocking events, and ii) adopting multi-link communications.