# Educational 5G Edge Computing: Framework and Experimental Study
## 1 Introduction  
5G is expected to bring significant economic and social benefits in the coming years [1], proving to be an area of great interest that has been debated over the past few years. 5G's ultra-fast speeds, lower latency and the ability to connect a massive number of mobile devices will enable new and improved opportunities to increase equal opportunity to education with distance and remote learning. The emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data has made a dramatic impact on the way teaching and learning activities are conducted, promoting the development of smart education and smart campuses. As a high-end form of an intelligent education system, a smart campus can comprehensively revolutionize campus activities and empower smart applications and specialized innovations in a campus. However, it is difficult for current educational communication systems based on 4G networks to meet the stringent requirements of intelligent applications in smart campuses, e.g., augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) teaching, live interactive lectures, and inspection robots, among other things. The reason for this lies in 4G's low transmission speed, poor quality and high latency, which hampersthe implementation of systems and applications in smart campuses. 5G networks are a promising way to solve the above key challenges in educational communication system. Compared with 4G networks, 5G has significantly improved the service characteristics in many aspects. Specifically, 5G supports up to 10 Gbps in enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) scenarios, millisecond-level latency in ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC) scenarios, and 100 million connections in massive machine-type communication (mMTC) scenarios [2; 3; 4]. For higher education, 5G leverages the new platforms based on AR/VR technologies to enhance students' learning experiences. 5G can be used to live stream lessons in real-time with an UHD 8K resolution, improving access to education in rural areas. 5G can potentiate the use of robots to help students with special needs by delivering the connectivity needed for these robots to respond in real-time. The bandwidth and responsiveness delivered by 5G networks will leverage the use of AR/VR technologies in education, enhancing students' learning experience. Several use cases related to 5G in the education sector are undergoing testing or have been implemented in universities around the world, providing enhanced learning experience, such as VR/AR for education, walled-off classrooms, smart campuses, real-time location services, AI-based systems to analyse students' engagement, classroom automated attendance systems, and automation of teachers' administrative tasks [5]. Although the current 5G technology has roughly matched the baseline communication requirements in smart campuses, the rich mobile applications and demands for large concurrent services can still result in excessive computation and transmission delay, as well as excessive network traffic load. The current campus infrastructures with centralized cloud servers can hardly meet the above requirements. To support real-time and heterogeneous applications, the concept of multi-access edge computing (MEC) has been proposed. MEC enables computing tasks to be offloaded to edge servers placed at radio access network (RAN) nodes. In this way, MEC can achieve lower end-to-end latency, reduced backhaul network load, less energy consumption, and more secure data transmission. Considering that the existing work has focused solely on high-level and abstract system design, as well as independent MEC-based resource scheduling algorithms and MEC-based smart campus applications, the structural design of 5G-MEC for smart campuses is still missing. However, this work is quite challenging and has many issues to be solved.