Aricent, a global design and engineering
company, today announced innovative Multi-access Edge (MEC) developer
capabilities for immersive experiences such as cloud gaming, Augmented
Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), and ultra-low latency industrial applications.
The software enables developers to rapidly deploy carrier-grade applications on
Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers that can be distributed as edge services.
Industry analysts peg the market for edge
computing applications to be worth over USD 6bn by 2020. This represents a
growing opportunity for over-the-top (OTT) players, equipment providers, and
operators to play a role in delivering next-generation experiences and content
faster with low network lags.
5G is still in a trial phase and the market
for Edge technology is growing. While there is uncertainty about how much
customers are willing to pay, mobile operators cannot ignore the opportunity
that Edge offers. Over the last several years, Aricent has been working closely
with several European and US Tier 1 Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and
Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) to support global Edge initiatives.
Aricent developer software development kits
(SDKs) and Edge infrastructure capabilities help solve some of the toughest
challenges in edge computing:
- Carrier-grade
access network functions
- Cloud-native
infrastructure for low-latency workloads
- Micro-services
on-boarding and application certification
- GPU/FPGA/CPU
acceleration of protocols and algorithms
- Security
controls for decentralized and distributed micro-services
Walid Negm, Chief Technology Officer at
Aricent said, "We work closely with our clients to develop a competitive
multi-access Edge growth strategy and then help them to engineer the best
architecture to suit their needs. To get the developer community engaged, we
see the need for an edge-friendly SDK and application onboarding capability.
The underlying deployment platform is extremely scalable, for example - it
helps the developers model which workloads need to be split across GPUs and
CPUs."
At Mobile World Congress, Aricent will use
Microsoft's AR-based HoloLens to demonstrate how mobile operators can leverage
Edge infrastructure to offload complex computing for ultra-fast processing.
Aricent will also showcase the benefits of video caching at the Edge to
dramatically improve mobile video Quality of Experience (QoE). By caching
popular video or live content at the edge, mobile operators can also save
backhaul costs.