Performance Evaluation of a Satellite Communication-based MEC architecture for IoT applications

New scenarios and use cases are raising following the birth of the fifth generation of mobile communications (5G). The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the main use cases which are growing, leading to a massive amount of data that needs to be exchanged throughout the Internet. Satellite Communi- cation (SatCom) networks are essential in remote and isolated environments and can support fully connected environments by offloading the terrestrial infrastructure concerning delay-tolerant traffic flows. However, satellite network resources are limited and expensive, so they need to be carefully used in order to avoid waste and satisfy the required user performance. The Multi- access Edge Computing (MEC) concept can be exploited in this context to allow data pre-processing at the edge, i.e., close to the users, so reducing the amount of data that has to traverse the backhaul satellite link and, in some cases, reducing data delivery times. This paper analyses the performance of a satellite architecture in the IoT framework highlighting the advantages brought by MEC, also including data aggregation and compression tech- niques.