Relay-empowered beyond 5G radio access networks with edge computing capabilities

Relevant services envisaged for beyond 5G (B5G) systems, such as extended reality and holographic communications, have extremely demanding user experience requirements with significant computational and communication demands. While edge computing aims to address the computation requirements by offloading the computational tasks to edge servers near the user, the communication will take advantage of the technologies developed for 5G New Radio jointly with an never-before-seen degree of network densification. This paper proposes the use of relays with edge computing capabilities. The approach's potential for B5G are identified, and a system model is defined to characterize both computational and communications viewpoints. Based on this, results are provided to highlight the gains and limitations of the proposed approach from a system-level perspective. Finally, the main challenges for enabling relays with computing capabilities in B5G deployments are discussed.