IEEE Softwarization - March 2016
A collection of short technical articles

5G Era Networks: The Case for Open Mobile Edge Cloud

By Cagatay Buyukkoc, PhD, AT&T

5G Era Networks defined a decade long transitional period and a new end-to-end (E2E) vision that is shaping up in industry and academia. It includes an evolved Radio-Access Network (eRAN), a next generation core, and a management/control plane that extends UE to core and beyond. It is a ubiquitous and responsive mobile-broadband network that will not only carry the (future) Internet traffic but also enable new applications and services. It is not just an air interface people sometimes equate with 5G.


Edge Definition and How It Fits with 5G Era Networks

By Cagatay Buyukkoc, PhD, AT&T

From the IEEE workshop that took place in November 2015 on Open Mobile Edge Cloud (OMEC): An open cloud platform that uses some end-user clients and located at the “mobile edge” to carry out a substantial amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers) and computation (including edge analytics, rather than relying on cloud data centers) in real time, communication (rather than routed over backbone networks), and control, policy and management (rather than controlled primarily by network gateways such as those in the LTE core).


Mobile Edge Computing: Bring the Values Back to Networks

By Yiping Chen and Laurent Ruckenbusch, Orange Labs

Mobile networks are evolving toward a software-defined infrastructure, including virtualization at the network edge. This evolution is an opportunity to rethink the overall mobile network infrastructure and the way the Radio Access Network and the Core Network are organized in order to introduce new use cases for network monetization and to improve noticeably mobile content delivery. This article shares our interpretation of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and some early thoughts within Orange Labs on this topic.


Rethinking the Mobile Edge Network with CORD (Mobile-CORD)

By Mingeun Yoon, SK telecom; Tom Tofigh, AT&T; and Guru Parulkar, Open Networking Lab

To open-up the wireless interfaces and achieve cloud benefits and agility based on SDN/NFV, Mobile CORD (M-CORD) is presented. The mobile Edge solutions enabled by M-CORD demonstrate practical and scalable models for services that require higher throughput and lower delay while minimizing the resource impacts on core network functions.


Mobile Edge Computing - An Important Ingredient of 5G Networks

By Lav Gupta and Raj Jain, Washington University in St. Louis; and H. Anthony Chan, Huawei Technologies, USA

5G is a collective name for technologies and methods that would go into the future networks to meet the extreme capacity and performance demands. The phrase 'no latency, gigabit experience' summarizes the user expectations that the industry is aspiring to meet. Both of the major standardization bodies, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have initiated activities relating to 5G [ITU15][ITU13 IMT2020][ETSI15] with commercial deployments expected in 2020.


Towards Software Defined 5G Radio Access Networks

By Tao Chen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; and Navid Nikaein, EURECOM

Network softwarization and virtualization are two key ingredients to abstract infrastructure resources and enable the delivery of the network as a service. Their tight coupling provides the flexibility needed to provision network resources on-demand and to compose and chain network service functions dynamically to meet a wide range of use-cases. Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies are expected to play an important role in 5G networks. Both SDN and NFV have been widely applied in mobile core network design. In this article we present the concept of software defined Radio Access Networks (RAN). We believe software defined design in RAN will be a key step to support network slicing, RAN sharing, flexible spectrum management and other key features in 5G networks.


MEC Enablement by Means of an Open Source ETSI MANO Orchestrator

By Giuseppe Antonio Carella and Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz, Technische Universität Berlin, Fraunhofer FOKUS

With the still growing number of mobile Internet users and the, albeit being not as fast, growing number of mobile Internet devices per person, the Next Generation Network (NGN) infrastructures will be increasingly challenged in the upcoming years. For reducing the impacts of such growing traffic, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and 5G trends are towards deploying software-based Network Functions on a heterogeneous infrastructure composed by a very large number of datacenters, able to dynamically cope with situation of peak loads.


Enhancing Mobile Services with Edge Computing Capabilities

By David Lake, Cisco Systems

This paper introduces Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), explaining how cloud resources placed close to the consumer can be harnessed to improve user experience across a range of use-cases. MEC provides a practical application of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The paper concludes by discussing the organisation and operation of the ETSI MEC Industry Standards Group (ISG).

 


 

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IEEE Softwarization Editorial Board

Laurent Ciavaglia, Editor-in-Chief
Mohamed Faten Zhani, Managing Editor
TBD, Deputy Managing Editor
Syed Hassan Ahmed
Dr. J. Amudhavel
Francesco Benedetto
Korhan Cengiz
Noel Crespi
Neil Davies
Eliezer Dekel
Eileen Healy
Chris Hrivnak
Atta ur Rehman Khan
Marie-Paule Odini
Shashikant Patil
Kostas Pentikousis
Luca Prete
Muhammad Maaz Rehan
Mubashir Rehmani
Stefano Salsano
Elio Salvadori
Nadir Shah
Alexandros Stavdas
Jose Verger