  The need for efficient use of network resources is continuously increasing
with the grow of traffic demand, however, current mobile systems have been
planned and deployed so far with the mere aim of enhancing radio coverage and
capacity. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable anymore, as 5G
communication systems will have to cope with huge amounts of traffic,
heterogeneous in terms of latency among other Qualityof- Service (QoS)
requirements. Moreover, the advent of Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) brings
up the need to more efficiently plan and dimension network deployment by means
of jointly exploiting the available radio and processing resources. From this
standpoint, advanced cell association of users can play a key role for 5G
systems. Focusing on a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), this paper proposes a
comparison between state-of-the-art (i.e., radio-only) and MEC-aware cell
association rules, taking the scenario of task offloading in the Uplink (UL) as
an example. Numerical evaluations show that the proposed cell association rule
provides nearly 60% latency reduction, as compared to its standard,
radio-exclusive counterpart.
