Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Data in Brief

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dib

Data Article

A dataset for mobile edge computing network

topologies
Bin Xiang a,∗, Jocelyne Elias b, Fabio Martignon c, Elisabetta Di Nitto a
a
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
b
University of Bologna, Italy
c
University of Bergamo, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is vital to support the numer-
Received 22 September 2021 ous, future applications that are envisioned in the 5G and
Revised 2 November 2021 beyond mobile networks. Since computation capabilities are
Accepted 3 November 2021 available at the edge of the network, applications that need
Available online 8 November 2021
ultra low-latency, high bandwidth and reliability can be de-
ployed more easily. This opens up the possibility of devel-
Keywords:
oping smart resource allocation approaches that can exploit
5G Network
Mobile edge computing
the MEC infrastructure in an optimized way and, at the same
Base stations time, fulfill the requirements of applications. However, up to
Network topology date, the progress of research in this area is limited by the
Geographic location unavailability of publicly available true MEC topologies that
Random graphs could be used to run extensive experiments and to compare
Network parameters the performance on different solutions concerning planning,
scheduling, routing etc. For this reason, we decided to infer
and make publicly available several synthetic MEC topologies
and scenarios.
Specifically, based on the experience we have gathered with
our experiments Xiang et al. [1], we provide data related to
3 randomly generated topologies, with increasing network
size (from 25 to 100 nodes). Moreover, we propose a MEC
topology generated from OpenCellID [2] real data and con-
cerning the Base Stations’ location of 234 LTE cells owned
by a mobile operator (Vodafone) in the center of Milan. We
also provide realistic reference parameters (link bandwidth,

DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.comnet.2021.108426

∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: bin.xiang@polimi.it (B. Xiang), jocelyne.elias@unibo.it (J. Elias), fabio.martignon@unibg.it (F. Mar-
tignon), elisabetta.dinitto@polimi.it (E. Di Nitto).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.107557
2352-3409/© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
2 B. Xiang, J. Elias and F. Martignon et al. / Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557

computation and storage capacity, offered traffic), derived

from real services provided by MEC in the deployment of 5G
networks.
© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc.
This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Specifications Table

Subject Computer Networks and Communications

Specific subject area Mobile Edge Computing, Edge Networks
Type of data Network Topologies description in CSV, Table, Graph, Figure
How data were acquired OpenCellID https://opencellid.org/
Data format Raw, Analyzed, Filtered
Parameters for data collection Base stations’ geographic locations for the selected network operators at a
specific region
Description of data collection Extracting data from the OpenCellID website by specifying the geographic
region
Data source location Milan, Italy
Data accessibility Repository name: GitHub, Zenodo Data identification number:
10.5281/zenodo.5558613 Direct URL to data:
https://github.com/bnxng/Topo4MEC
Related research article B. Xiang, J. Elias, F. Martignon, E. Di Nitto, Resource Calendaring for Mobile
Edge Computing: Centralized and Decentralized Optimization Approaches,
Computer Networks 199 (2021) 108426.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2021.108426

Value of the Data

• The datasets provide network topologies, computation, storage and traffic parameters that
can be used as test instances and benchmarks for evaluating and comparing resource allo-
cation approaches in the context of Mobile Edge Computing. No real network topologies are
currently made publicly available in the context of MEC.
• Researchers who work in the field of Mobile Edge Computing can benefit from these datasets.
• The network topologies and parameters provided in this work can be used for performance
evaluation in research problems related to MEC like traffic routing, network planning, re-
source scheduling, among others.

1. Data Description

The datasets include four network topologies for Mobile Edge Computing [3] and the corre-
sponding reference parameters for the networks. Both random topologies having different scales
(Fig. 1) and a realistic one derived from open datasets for base stations (Fig. 2 c) are provided.
The structural information of the topologies is summarized in Table 1, which reports the num-
bers of nodes, edges, ingress nodes (marked in red in Fig. 1 and with gray shadow in Fig. 2c), as
well as the minimum, maximum and average degrees of the nodes, and the network diameter

Table 1
Structural information of the topologies.

Topology name #Nodes #Edges #Ingress Degree (Min, Max, Avg) Diameter

25N50E 25 50 4 ( 2.0, 7.0, 4.0 ) 4

50N50E 50 50 8 ( 1.0, 7.0, 2.0 ) 12
100N150E 100 150 16 ( 1.0, 8.0, 3.0 ) 8
MilanCityCenter 30 35 7 ( 1.0, 8.0, 2.3 ) 8
 B. Xiang, J. Elias and F. Martignon et al. / Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557 3

Fig. 1. Random network topologies. Ingress nodes for each graph are colored in red. (For interpretation of the references
to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 2. Milan City Center topology with 30 nodes, 35 edges and 6 ingress nodes (marked with gray shadow).

Table 2
Reference values and ranges for network parameters in the considered topologies.

Parameter Reference value Range

Link bandwidth Be (Gbit/s) 50 10 ∼ 100 (e ∈ E)

Computation capacity Dv (Giga cycles/s) 30 10 ∼ 60 (v ∈ V)
Storage capacity Sv (GByte) 20 10 ∼ 40 (v ∈ V)
Traffic rate λk (Gbit/s) 25 10 ∼ 50 (k ∈ K)

(the longest of all the shortest paths in the network). All topology datasets are publicly available
in the GitHub repository. In the repository, the topologies data are provided in four folders, viz.,
25N50E, 50N50E, 100N150E and MilanCityCenter. Each folder contains three files: a JPEG image of
the topology (also illustrated in Figs. 1 and 2 c hereafter), a text file of the topology data stored
in edge-list format (with each row representing one edge/link), and a text file storing the list
of the ingress nodes. The topology data (in edge-list format) has three columns, where the first
two columns represent, respectively, the first and second nodes of the edge, and the last column
represents the bandwidth value of the edge.
Table 2 shows the reference network parameters (as further motivated in Section 2.2) that
can be assigned to these network topologies, represented by undirected graphs G (V, E ). Each
node v ∈ V represents an edge computing node having Dv and Sv as computation and storage ca-
pacity, respectively. Each edge e ∈ E corresponds to a network link characterized by its bandwidth
Be . Let K denote the set of traffic demands offered to the network from the ingress nodes, which
represent aggregated demands of different, typical service classes, e.g., web, video, gaming, etc,
and λk is the corresponding arrival rate. Link bandwidth and traffic rates are expressed in Gi-
gabits/s, the storage capacity in Gigabytes while the computation capacity is expressed in Giga
cycles/s. Besides the reference value, different ranges are further indicated for all these parame-
ters to capture different configurations and traffic levels.
4 B. Xiang, J. Elias and F. Martignon et al. / Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557

2. Experimental Design, Materials and Methods

2.1. Network topologies

We describe hereafter the process we followed to generate the proposed network topologies,
starting from random ones and then moving to a real network scenario where we used the local-
ization information of several hundreds of Base Stations of a real mobile operator in the Milan
city center.
We would like to point out that the main issue for the scientific community involved in test-
ing optimization models and algorithms on real mobile network topologies is that it is not so
easy to have access to the true topology interconnecting Base Stations (BSs), since such informa-
tion concerning the network architecture is both quite sensitive for the mobile operator and also
in continuous evolution. For this reason, it is unlikely that even just the Radio Access Network
(RAN) topology of a mobile operator is known and publicly available, since it would provide sen-
sitive details on its mobile network. At the same time, also the information about where edge
servers are installed in a MEC architecture is generally not publicly available; typically, it de-
pends on the chosen architecture and on the providers that the mobile operator decides to use.
Some operators do not necessarily install one server in each cell. In fact, according to the spec-
ifications, the Edge server is an entity that can be installed in a completely separate network
with respect to the access network or it can be installed in the same cabinet of the BS. Hence,
knowing the cell location does not necessarily provide the servers’ topology.
For all these reasons, we decided to infer and make publicly available the ones described
below.

2.1.1. Random graphs

Erdös-Rényi random graphs [4] with different numbers of nodes (from 25 to 100) and edges
(from 50 to 150) are generated. Note that, following such procedure, isolated nodes and com-
ponents may exist in the generated graphs. To generate a connected network graph, for each
isolated node v we first randomly sample nodes from the graph (the number of sampled nodes
is chosen equal to the average node degree), and then connect them to v. Finally, we randomly
eliminate extra edges to meet the desired number of edges while verifying that we still pro-
duce a connected graph. These topologies (indicated as 25N50E, 50N50E and 100N150E) can be
viewed as representatives of Edge Network configurations where multiple edge nodes are scat-
tered in different ways over a certain territory.

2.1.2. A real network scenario

We further considered a real network scenario, with the actual deployment of Base Stations
(BSs) collected from the open database OpenCellID [2]. Specifically, we considered the “Milan
City Center” area around Duomo and selected one mobile operator (Vodafone) with 234 LTE
(Long Term Evolution) cells falling in such area (see Fig. 2a). The BSs deployment shows where
the BSs are located, while it does not show their interconnection topology nor where the edge
clouds are deployed, since, as discussed before, such piece of information is both sensitive for
the mobile operator and in continuous evolution.
Therefore, from the BSs location we generate a possible topology for the selected “Milan City
Center” area through the following steps.
• We first perform a clustering on the LTE cells and assume MEC nodes are deployed only at
the center of the clusters. This is to take into account that deploying the same number of
MEC nodes as BSs would result in high expenditures by the network operators. The number
of clusters could depend on the deployment budget of the network operator. Fig. 2b shows
the details of the clustering, where, using the KMeans [5] algorithm, we obtain 30 clusters
marked with different colors (corresponding to the number of cells belonging to each clus-
ter). Note that other clustering methods can also be employed, like DBSCAN [6], a density
based clustering algorithm, which does not require to specify the number of clusters but re-
quires density parameters, e.g., the maximum distance between two nodes and the minimum
 B. Xiang, J. Elias and F. Martignon et al. / Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557 5

number of nodes in a neighborhood to be considered. KMeans is more suitable in our case for
directly controlling the number of clusters and, as a consequence, the network expenditure.
• Then, we generate a geometric graph by connecting any two nodes (cluster centroids) if the
distance is lower than a given threshold (we fixed such parameter to 800 m). In this way, a
dense graph with many links among the MEC nodes is produced, which might not be cost-
effective due to the high costs for setting up links.
• Finally, we generate the Minimum Spanning Tree of the geometric graph weighted by the
link distance and cluster size, which can represent a least total costs solution for setting
up the network links. Moreover, to increase the redundancy and hence the reliability of the
topology, we further preserve more links that connect some small nodes to the corresponding
aggregation node, i.e., a node that is reached by multiple other nodes, as it happens in real
networks. The final topology is illustrated in Fig. 2c, and edge clouds can be installed in all
nodes (as suggested by 5G specifications).

2.2. Network parameters - motivation

The parameter settings proposed in this paper (see Table 2) are in line with those proposed
in the various recent works. Among others, we cite the following: the white paper [7] illus-
trates the 5G testbed deployed by Cosmote (a Greek network operator, also provider of an Edge
Computing infrastructure), which is based on an Openstack-based multi-cloud infrastructure in-
terconnected with 10 Gbps fiber/copper links. The survey in [8] illustrates network capabilities
and requirements of MEC hosts in smart metropolitan areas, and shows that every MEC host
can use, on average, at least 62.5 Gbps in downlink and 10.41 Gbps in uplink. In [9], the authors
study the network requirements to implement a use case of MEC-based Augmented Reality as-
sisted remote surgery, which requires a bandwidth of at least 30 Gbps.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal rela-
tionships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT Author Statement

Bin Xiang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft; Jocelyne

Elias: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing; Fabio Martignon: Conceptualization, Writ-
ing – review & editing; Elisabetta Di Nitto: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016 SPOTLIGHT under grant agree-
ment number 722788 and the H2020-ICT-2020-1 PIACERE under grant agreement number
1010 0 0162.
6 B. Xiang, J. Elias and F. Martignon et al. / Data in Brief 39 (2021) 107557

References
[1] B. Xiang, J. Elias, F. Martignon, E. Di Nitto, Resource calendaring for mobile edge computing: centralized and decen-
tralized optimization approaches, Comput. Netw. 199 (2021) 108426.
[2] OpenCellID, 2021, (https://opencellid.org/).
[3] Q.-V. Pham, F. Fang, V.N. Ha, M.J. Piran, M. Le, L.B. Le, W.-J. Hwang, Z. Ding, A survey of multi-Access edge computing
in 5G and beyond: fundamentals, technology integration, and state-of-the-art, IEEE Access 8 (2020) 116974–117017,
doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3001277.
[4] P. Erdős, A. Rényi, On Random Graphs I, 6, Publicationes Mathematicae Debrecen, 1959, pp. 290–297.
[5] S. Lloyd, Least squares quantization in PCM, Technical Report RR-5497, Bell Lab(1957).
[6] M. Ester, H.-P. Kriegel, J. Sander, X. Xu, A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases
with noise, in: Proceedings of the KDD, 1996, pp. 226–231.
[7] D. Artuñedo Guillen, B. Sayadi, P. Bisson, J.P. Wary, H. Lonsethagen, C. Antón, A. de la Oliva, A. Kaloxylos, V. Frascolla,
5GPPP technology board working group, 5G-IA’s trials working group: edge computing for 5G networks(2021).
[8] F. Spinelli, V. Mancuso, Toward enabled industrial verticals in 5G: a survey on MEC-Based approaches to provisioning
and flexibility, IEEE Commun. Surveys Tutor. 23 (1) (2020) 596–630.
[9] P. Ranaweera, M. Liyanage, A.D. Jurcut, Novel MEC based approaches for smart hospitals to combat COVID-19 pan-
demic, IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag. 10 (2) (2020) 80–91.