Mobile Edge Vertical Computing over 5G Network Sliced Infrastructures: An Insight into Integration Approaches

5G is designed to leverage on network soft-warization technologies, like NEV and MEC, to expose customized network instances and resources at the edge of the infrastructure to vertical stakeholders. Most of the 5G success will depend on the ability to attract vertical stakeholders acting in the cloud, enabling them to smoothly port cloud applications to 5G, and to add performance and cognitive capabilities not supported in cloud environments. To this end, this article provides an insight into the possible architectural approaches to fully integrate vApps into the 5G infrastructure. The article follows a top-down approach. First, it provides an outlook on the state of the art in cloud application design, and on the new MEC and NFV capabilities. Then, on this basis, the analysis is devoted to identifying integration issues not yet fully addressed in standards specifications. Two alternative architectural approaches are discussed.