Technique to allow a UE (User Equipment) to access services which are hosted close to the serving base station. It brings application hosting from centralized data centers down to the network edge to be closer to consumers. Goal is to achieve an efficient service delivery through the lower end-to-end latency and the reduced load on the transport network.

Even though MEC has been popularized by 5G, it is also possible to use this technique on 4G. It is less standard but totally possible to be deployed.