The MEC Congress 2017, dedicated to Edge Computing (EC), was held in Berlin from the 25th to 27th September, in which Altice Labs was represented by Carlos Parada, from the Technological Coordination and Innovation department.
Sometime after the cloud being concentrated on large data centers, there has been a trend of decentralization in recent years, aiming at bringing users closer to services. The purpose of this technology is to reduce latencies in order to support new applications such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Games, or Industry 4.0, among others, which have very strict latency requirements. This proximity to users also allows greater efficiency in the backhaul network, reducing traffic between the access and the core.
At this event, Altice Labs presented its developments in this area, as well as the results already achieved. Altice Labs has been building a platform compatible with ETSI MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) standards, having already developed a prototype, which is being validated and tested under a ProCode (proof-of-concept) in collaboration with MEO, in Lisbon.
The results obtained so far are quite encouraging, showing the platform’s ability to quickly instantiate services at the edge, reducing service latency (end-to-end) in a very significant way. By using 4G technologies, latencies have been obtained in the order of 10ms; however, with the arrival of 5G, values around 1ms are expected.