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.