# Educational 5G Edge Computing: Framework and Experimental Study
## 1 Introduction
After discussions with more than 100 higher vocational colleges and deployments in more than 30 campuses [6], the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) has identified several key issues regarding the currently designated MEC framework [7], as well as long-term network issues, equipment management issues faced by education customers, new and old application integration problems, data island problems, and others. We list and discuss the problems that hamper the implementation and deployment of educational 5G edge computing with practical settings in the smart campus scenario. * _New infrastructure is needed to implement a campus network that can be monitored, managed and controlled in a unified and agile manner._ The reason is threefold: 1. The numerous campus information systems can significantly degrade the available bandwidth; 2. Multiple access technologies coexist, including 5G, 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, NB-IoT, LoRa, fiber, and more. Due to the inconsistent network management and construction methods of different campus networks, it is not easy to establish seamless communications among campus networks, which causes serious information islands and brings high operating and maintenance costs; 3. Furthermore, the lack of common guidelines and standards for multi-network fusion hinders the development of innovative educational applications because educational and teaching data are difficult to share among numerous educational subsystems [8; 9]. Even though multiple access functions are defined in the MEC architecture [10], there is no detailed management method for different networks to deal with these issues. * _The application authentication is not unified; thus, user data needs to be aggregated and connected_[11]. The applications lack a unified portal, making them inconvenient for teachers to teach classes, e.g., application management is problematic. Data silos are serious, and manually reporting is inefficient in increasing teachers' workload. The lack of regional governance results in an inability to analyze data effectively. Hence, it is essential to solve the problem of a unified application portal and realize rapid deployment as well as the aggregation and display of campus data. * _Urgent need for efficient device management to schedule computing resources._ Considering the resource becomes more constrained with the deployment of more smart applications, it is necessary to manage the devices and services based on the temporal and spatial characteristics of campus users, especially with the tidal effects of various campus applications [6]. * _Current MEC structures cannot guarantee data security._ Although many solutions have been proposed to ensure the security of educational data [12; 13], the campus still intends to comprehensively supervise the 5G-based smart educational information infrastructure to fully protect sensitive data such as educational teaching and student portraits. Considering that many network elements (such as user plane function (UPF), application function (AF), network element function (NEF), MEC services, and others) are integrated with MEP and do not support independent deployment, which may interfere with the normal operation of MEP and thus render 5G networks unavailable, communication service providers (CSPs) are not allowed to conduct school-specific MEC deployments. In addition, schools prefer to conduct the necessary exchange of signaling with the 5G network rather than expose their applications, educational teaching and scientific research data to CSPs. To address the above issues faced by practical smart campuses, this paper proposes a new system architecture--educational 5G edge computing. The proposed framework includes a dedicated network for education and a dedicated edge cloud for smart education based on MEC.