ETSI MEC addresses multi-access, service APIs, and NFV

Edge computing progress update

The ETSI MEC ISG was established in 2014, with support from founding members Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia Networks, NTT DoCoMo, and Vodafone. As originally conceived, ETSI MEC's telco-focused work was intended to provide IT and cloud computing capabilities in the RAN, with ETSI's role being to identify the network requirements necessary to allow applications to be hosted in a multivendor, mobile-edge computing environment.


ETSI MEC is recognized as a key contributing technology to 5G, alongside developments such as software-defined networking (SDN)/NFV, cloud-based architectures, and network slicing. Support for edge computing is also addressed in 3GPP's ongoing work on the system architecture for 5G, and close cooperation between ETSI and 3GPP is essential for the coexistence between MEC and both LTE and 5G.


The ETSI MEC Technical Specification Group (TSG) completed Phase 1 of its work program in 2016. The first set of Phase 2 specifications, which were released in March, cover the architecture, framework, and general principles for service APIs, as well as widening the scope of ETSI MEC to include any access technology and to take into account integration with NFV (see Table 2).

In February 2019, ETSI MEC created theDeployment and Ecosystem Development working group (WG DECODE), whose task will be to accelerate market adoption and implementation of systems using the MEC-defined framework, and services exposed using MEC-standardized APIs. The activities of DECODE will include:

  • facilitating the use of open source components for the implementation and validation of MEC-related use cases or MEC system entities
  • identifying best practices to implement a MEC system by leveraging cloud application design, orchestration and automation, and security and reliability advances
  • enabling operator adoption and interoperability by developing and maintaining specifications related to testing, including guidelines and API conformance specifications
  • increasing the accessibility and adoption of MEC specifications and opening up the ecosystem to third-party application developers.