The main objectives of MEC are: optimization of mobile resources by hosting compute-intensive applications, pre-processing of the large data before sending it to the cloud, enabling cloud services within the close proximity of mobile subscribers, and providing context-aware services with the help of radio access network information.

In doing so, MEC enables a wide variety of applications, e.g. where real-time responses are strictly required, e.g. applications for driverless vehicles, virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR), robotics, and immerse media.

ETSI ISG officially changed the name of mobile edge computing to mean multi-access edge computing in 2017.