Telco Edge Cloud "Intelligence is everywhere"

Introduction

Telco edge cloud is more than a buzzword. In the modern telecommunication industry, it is indeed arising as a key component in the journey to 5G. Most of the top mobile service providers have already deployed edge cloud architecture in their networks to support and deliver the services on top of 5G.

This article would shed some light on the importance of the telco edge cloud from the service provider perspective as it has already begun significantly to reshape the telecom domain.

The Edge is what it all matters…

Telco edge cloud is a highly distributed multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture integrated with telecom network structures (RAN, Transport, and Core) and offers traditional and non-traditional cloud computing services such as IaaS, PaaS, NaaS, and SaaS with enabling higher proximity for the end-users.

The main advantage of the telco edge cloud is none other than the low latency for real-time applications and transport efficiency for data-intensive applications. Architecture is also resilient with trust, privacy, security, and mobility over the operator 5G network. 

High Data Speeds… High Volumes…. More Expansions…. High Cost…!!

In the era of 5G, the world tends to talk a lot about increasing data speeds and rapid expansions of the backbone capacity of the telco networks. To make the matter worse, traffic flowing from millions of IoT devices also occupies a reasonable chunk in the backbone network. Increasing data speeds results in high data volumes that need capacity expansions in the backbone which allocates more investments in the annual budget plans. 

On the other hand, not only the usage would increase of real-time applications such as gaming, AR/VR, Data Analytics, Machine learning, but also, those applications may need a near real-time latency that would be difficult to achieve from the existing 3G and 4G networks due to the growth of data speeds and high processing requirements. 

So, user-generated traffic needs to be stored or handled locally by putting significant edge-computing infrastructure (MEC) in place to avoid these kinds of scenarios. This gives birth to the concept of edge cloud.

Characteristics of the Edge…

• Ability to use as a common platform across edges and with a unified management plane
• Usage for the services in the edge can be monitored, reported, and billed
• Supports multi-tenancy where multiple tenants are isolated from one another
• Users can provision their own applications as a self-service on top of the edge
• Dynamic adaptation of network quality on-demand for customer applications
• Resource pooling of physical and virtual resources with elasticity and scalability
• System supports on-demand reconfiguration in-service migration between zones

Where should be the edge…

(Source: STL Partners)

The edge cloud can be deployed at different levels in the telco network.

• Far edge - Near to the customer locations like macro cell sites, street cabinets
• Near edge - Within network aggregation points
• Regional core - Within regional data centers
• Cloud core - Within core data centers. private cloud (NFVi) or Public Cloud

Depending on the overall requirement, target use cases, technical aspects (latency and bandwidth), and importantly the overall strategy for the telco edge cloud would decide where to consider as the edge in the network.

The journey from Centralized Core to an Edge Cloud

(Source: Techmania)

Even though it is very fascinating to think about the edge cloud at a high level, the readiness of the infrastructure and moving away from traditional centralized architecture to an edge architecture in a telco domain requires some significant effort.

Identifying correct objectives and target uses cases (Gaming, AR/VR, Data Analytics, Machine learning, Private networks) plays a vital role in deploying an edge cloud. This should be analyzed on a short-term as well as long-term basis. Target use cases should be matched business requirements and market readiness.

Migration of the correct applications to the edge cloud environment considering the scale-in and scale-out capabilities, cloud-native readiness of the applications, moveability, and scalability.

Planning and designing the correct geographical locations and distribution of the edge cloud architecture. Need to identify the market dynamics in specific areas such as urban, suburban, and rural to decide the edge locations.

Training people, making new processes, and adaptation of the edge cloud technology might be challenging for some operators as it would replace some of the service dimensions of the whole network. So, providing adequate knowledge on the technology, and aligning processes accordingly would be a major point to ponder.

Even though the edge cloud architecture is a distributed one, it needs to ensure that the users will not feel any separation of services in their whole product life cycles. A single pane for a unified user experience should be taken into care.

Final Note

So, in a nutshell, Telco Edge Cloud is a platform where individual developers, enterprises, retail customers, and service providers develop and deploy solutions that would be supported by global telco infrastructure, simple and single interface while benefiting fast, secure, and reliable 5G architecture.