Mobile Edge Computing: The Future of True 5G
Driving the future of 5G with mobile edge computing.
The promise of 5G hasn’t been met with performance, but it’s too early to proclaim its failure. True 5G is on its way with mobile edge computing – and data centers will be at the core of it, discusses Raul K. Martynek, chief executive officer at DataBank.
All the major mobile carriers heavily promote their ability to deliver 5G access to wireless networks across the U.S. At the same time, consumers and businesses eagerly await the next killer apps that will cause digital processes to take a quantum leap in performance and efficiency. However, true 5G speeds and capabilities also depend on mobile edge computing. Mobile edge computing is all about wireless carriers enabling applications to be more responsive on their networks, with data centers at the heart of enabling the integration of applications and network interfaces.
Consider multi-player gaming. It’s impossible to deliver equal performance to all users if the carriers can’t keep the packets local (aka, at the metro level). If one person is on a Verizon device and another is on an AT&T device, the two packet streams might peer hundreds of miles away, causing jitter and latency, making for discouraged gamers in all locales. Similarly, if the game software stack is located 1,500 miles away in a core data center market, then the performance will not compare to a console experience in the house. Both the network and the compute and storage of the application need to be local. That locality will occur inside an edge data center and leverage the 5G capabilities of mobile-edge computing.
Gaming developers need 5G wireless networks to keep packets among multiple phones on different networks within the same metropolitan area—so that the network and the application work in concert and are aware of each other. Then, because the network and the application stack are developed by different parties, that exchange needs to occur in a multi-tenant edge data center that allows for interconnection, security, carrier neutrality, and scalability. Only then can video games deliver equal and enjoyable experiences to users and leverage wireless networks for ubiquitous coverage.
Here’s how the infrastructure improvements must play out.
The Four Critical Components of 5G
In reality, the promise of 5G to deliver such experiences is still several years away. While the carriers are making progress, they still have much to do to deploy a true “standalone” 5G network. Getting there requires the network evolution of four critical components:
- Incorporating the full-frequency, three-spectrum-band “layer cake” all the way from cell towers, small cells, or rooftop RF distributions to devices. This weaves together low, mid, and high band frequencies that will provide the Ultra-Wide Broadband (UWB) and Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) of 5G; the carriers are about 25% of the way to completing this component.
- Re-architecting network cores from 4G to 5G virtualized. This will transform the cores from a centralized design to an architecture where a relatively smaller number of control points are disaggregated into dozens of user-plane locations where applications can access the network at a more local level.
- Virtualizing Radio Access Networks (cRAN or vRAN) so cell towers in a region can pool their resources to handle peak user activity and improve handoff between cell zones. This eliminates the need to size each individual macro site for peak activity, which is the case with 4G.
- Leveraging open network components where the key network functions are ‘virtualized” as software that runs on commodity hardware and allows applications to plug directly into networks. This approach enables a more proximate location for mobile users to access edge computing at cRAN cell tower locations and performing like the internet in terms of aggregation points.
Once carriers have all four components in place — and have migrated customers from 4G frequencies to the 5G layer cake frequency bands — then the true promise of 5G can be delivered with wireless networks that can support millions of IP addresses in each cell zone (massive-machine-to-machine communications) while delivering 1-gigabit speeds to users (ultra-wide broadband), latency under 10 milliseconds (ultra-low latency communications), and very low jitter.
With this new wireless network topology, true multi-access edge computing (MEC) can occur, where networks and application stacks can come together and programmatically interact. That’s what mobile edge computing is all about, capable of delivering the ultimate user experience in gaming, e-retail, financial trading, or any mobile interaction you can imagine.
See More: 4 Challenges of the Edge to Cloud Evolution
Data Centers Play a Key Role in Mobile Edge Computing
True 5G comes at a steep cost—$100 billion in capital expenditures. Even if carriers make the investment required by 5G, they still need the ecosystem of software developers, SaaS companies, and hardware manufacturers to create the next generation of applications and devices that can effectively leverage the enhanced capabilities of a 5G network.
That ecosystem will need physical locations in which to interact, similar to the way applications and networks come together today. Those locations are, and will be, multi-tenant edge data centers located in dozens of metro geographies. These edge data centers and on-ramps need to be connected with 5G networks to create mobile edge computing infrastructures for developing, deploying, and scaling low-latency applications.
By definition, 5G and mobile edge computing are disaggregated, but at the end of the day, applications and their data all end up in the data center. To bring wireless computing to end-users, cloud providers need to utilize data centers in all the top metros across the U.S. that offer the required power density, cooling, security, and interconnectivity.
Fear Not: 5G Will Happen
Going back to the emergence of the commercial internet, each technology cycle has had the same pattern. Consider when carriers first launched 4G. Skeptics doubted whether any new app would use all the new capacity; recall how happy everyone was with a tactile keyboard Blackberry. Not long after, smartphones began to emerge, and before you knew it, an app ecosystem developed that created thousands of use cases that people consumed. A similar generation of apps enabled by 5G will allow carriers to recover their investments, and ten years from now, the impact of 5G will be no different than the impact 4G has had on today’s society and the business world.
As everyone waits for that next killer app or set of killer apps that can leverage all the extra bandwidth and ultra-low latency that 5G promises, the internet today works pretty well. Now consider artificial intelligence models for real-time language translation, virtual reality apps for training and navigation, and autonomous vehicles and drones, and you can start to imagine what can occur in the future with 5G.
Fear not – 5G will happen. No doubt, it will be impactful. Unlike 4G and 3G, when they designed 5G, they considered how the network, the data, and the applications all need to be connected. That’s what makes 5G different – and more powerful — than previous wireless architectures. 5G, and more importantly, applications that leverage 5G, will catch on as the network bandwidth and latency come up to speed and as networks are built and connected at the application layer. Those connections will be enabled inside multi-tenant edge data centers in a large number of metro markets. Today’s data centers will continue to expand, and the convergence of cloud and network will unleash a new generation of applications and use cases.
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