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Countless presentations, articles and research papers propose use cases for edge computing today.

The authors of these propose everything from supporting billions of smart devices to reshaping the very plumbing of the internet itself, and many of these ideas and concepts hold significant promise for the future. However, use cases that can be put into practice today are extremely important, as they help advance the economic and technical elements driving the adoption of edge computing, ensuring the infrastructure needed to support other uses is created.

Luckily, there is no shortage of interestingand valuable use cases that are being readily explored today at the edge. As isdescribed below, these uses cases range from what could be referred to asinfrastructure transformation, where edge computing is used to augment orreimagine the underlying systems upon which many edge use cases may be built,to more specific activities such as supporting the use of autonomous drones andother low-latency devices that require new edge resources.

There are many different types of edgecomputing. However, this article focuses on what is known as infrastructure edge computing, asdefined in the Open Glossary of Edge Computing. This modelpositions elastic, cloud-like compute, storage and network resources as closeas possible to their users on the operator side of the last mile network, whetherthat network itself is wireless or wired, to provide scalable low-latencyoperation for a range of use cases.

The three use cases described below representsome of the most promising edge deployments of today. They are being activelydeployed at the edge by a range of companies, both large and small, establishedand emerging. What they all have in common is their reliance on robust edgecomputing infrastructure to make them a true reality:

For any vehicle, whether operating on land, inthe air or at sea, rapid decision-making ensures safe and reliable operation.Machines are capable of many things, but their ability to interpret potentialissues in the real world is far more limited than our own. In the case of fullyautonomous drones operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), the targetlatency between the drone and its control applications is under 10 ms. Becausea drone has serious weight constraints, the most robust autonomous controlsnecessitate the use of infrastructure edge computing, where decision-supportapplications such as telemetry, collaborative processing and radar can bedelivered within this tight latency limit. The alternatives are unsafe,inefficient or manual operation.

In many cases, in todays legacy environments,the traffic that a device sends to the internet may take a long andcircuitous path, adding unnecessarytransport costs and latency. For example, data communication between two devices in the same city may, infact, traverse long distances, often spanning multiple states in the UnitedStates, before it reaches its destination. This is due to the way telecomsnetworks have been built, utilizingcomparatively few points of centralized aggregation that are able to exchangedata between networks. These Internet Exchange (IX) points are vital to theoperation of the internet, but in many emerginguse cases require a new and complementary entity, the Edge Exchange (EX).The EX augments the capabilities of the IX by allowing traffic which would staywithin a city to be exchanged much closer to its intended users, allowing theirlatency limitations to be met, while continuing to pass on Internet-boundtraffic to the traditional IX, as is already done today.

To allow greater flexibility, reduce costs andimprove performance, the Virtualized Radio Access Network (VRAN) and networksupgrades to 5G are hot topics for many wireless network operators, includingmany of the large, household name cellular carriers in the United States. Whenthe RAN is virtualized and many of the key radio functions can bedisaggregated, the result is a simpler and more flexible network However, these virtualized network functionsneed to perform complex processing in close proximity to the cell tower orradio head, under strict latency constraints. Infrastructure edge computingsites provide an ideal environment in which to run these functions, offeringthe dense compute, storage and network resources required to support these newcapabilities across many wireless network sites in the area.

Edge computing uses cases like those describedhere can add great value to almost any aspect of the wider technologylandscape. Many of these use cases are being deployed today at infrastructureedge computing sites, and those experiences are being presented to a wideraudience by leading companies in the edge computing ecosystem today.

Join Edgecon Austin, afternoon of 5thNovember, and Edge Congress 6th November, the premier event seriesto get up to speed on the latest happenings at the Edge.

http://www.edgecongress.com

Edgecon November 5th, 2019, 14:30 20:30 PMG

7CO 1501 E 7th St, Austin, TX 78702

Edge Congress November 6th 2019,09:00 20:30 PMG

Fair Market, 1100 E 5th St, Austin, TX 78702

Join the worlds top edge computing executivesat the Edge Global Congress. Industry players will be talking real deployments,solutions, and applications at the edge during this exclusive event.

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AWS and Verizon partner on 5G edge cloud computing - Data Economy