Table of Contents

Blueprint Overview

Introduction & Purpose of EALTEdge

Enterprise Application on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge is an Akraino approved a blueprint under 5G/MEC system blueprint family, which . It intends to make a complete ecosystem for provide a edge computing platform along with application orchestration & management to host enterprise applications on lightweight 5G Telco Edge Enterprise level platform. Platform which can be leveraged by various Telecom operators to give value added services to end users. 

The edge layer which this blueprint targets is the Telco Edge. 

Below are the high-level features which this blueprint will go on to implement in phase-wise.

• Lightweight MEP Solution
• Autonomous MEP Edge Sites. 
• Unified Portal for platform management and for App developers.
• Sandbox with SDKs and tools chains for MEC app developers
• Heterogeneous deployment on Multi-Arch. 
• ETSI MEC Compliant.

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Use Case

Lightweight MEC platform, enable real-time enterprise applications on 5G telco edge.

Applications: 

Diverse types of applications in various sectors, not limited to below:
● Gaming Applications, VR Live broadcasting
● The industrial park, Campus office etc.
● Video Orchestration and Optimization
● Latency Sensitive Application for Enterprise scenarios Etc

Use Case 1 

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Use Case 2

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Use Case 3

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Use Case 4:

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Business Drivers

The EALTEdge Blueprint is for the Telco Edge, it targets the telecom operators to leverage this blueprint platform services and provide value added service, in return for better revenue generation. It also provide an Application Development Ecosystem by providing open SDK to developer community to develop application which can be tested and deployed easily on the MEP sites. 

Overall Architecture

The Enterprise Applications on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge platform architecture consists of a One Click Deployment Node(OCD host), Center Node  and single to multiple Edge Nodes .

Overall architecture diagram of the blueprint.

In Collaboration with Other BP in same family "5G MEC/Slice System to Support Cloud Gaming, HD Video and Live Broadcasting" (5G MEC/Slice System to Support Cloud Gaming, HD Video and Live Broadcasting Blueprint), this BP intend to provide Lightweight 5G telco Edge platform for Enterprise Applications. Some  components which require to interconnection with 5G system, will be integrated from this BP. 

Tentative Roadmap of this integration is Q3 2021.

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Release 4 Architecture and Components are as below:

In this release BP has been targeted to provide developer centric lightweight telco edge platform with reference in ETSI MEC.

In future BP will interconnect with 5G system in collaboration with "5G MEC/Slice System to Support Cloud Gaming, HD Video and Live Broadcasting" by integrating 5G componets from the BP. 

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Figure 1 – EALTEdge R4 Architecture

CENTER

CENTER Node consists of 3 components.  MECM , AppStore and Developer Platform.  MEC Manager is the central entity in the MEC system responsible for application and service deployment in an highly distributed computing environment, it provides overall view of hosts and applications deployed in the hosts. 
MECM: comprises of MEO and MEPM which performs the following tasks
➢ MEO: Maintains system level view of edges and carries out the Application orchestration to the desired Edge based on Application requirements and Edge node resource availability.

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. Provided edge computing platform and management is meant to be in compliance with ETSI MEC (please refer ETSI MEC for further details - https://www.etsi.org/technologies/multi-access-edge-computing). BP also intend to provide platform for enterprise application developers to develop, test, package & onboard their applications easily & quickly, thereby empowering developers to innovate & ship faster. Also eventually BP aims to provide platform capabilities and features like Multi-Tenancy, Network-Isolation, Dynamic Orchestration, Network Capabilities exposure, enhanced identification etc. as needed for "MEC in an Enterprise Setting"

BP plan is to leverage EdgeGallery (http://www.edgegallery.org/) as its upstream project to provide Edge Computing platform, Application Management and platform for application developers. It is also planned to leverage EdgeConnector & EdgeGateway of another BP in same BP family (https://wiki.akraino.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=11995699&src=contextnavpagetreemode) to enable features like dynamic & flexible traffic offloading. BP also have plans to add platform capabilities, sample enterprise applications and some features specifically needed for Enterprise use case through new development/integration of other open sources.

The edge computing platform(s) (MEP) needs to be installed at the telco edge(s) and Application development/management related components (MECM (MEO+MEPM+Edge Connector), AppStore, Developer Platform) needs to be installed in Telco's cloud (private/public). Edge computing platform (MEP) provides a platform as a service environment for running "Enterprise Applications" In order to be useful, BP requires 5G RAN & UPF to enable connectivity & have configurations based on use case need. Also 5Gc and OSS system needs to be in place with desired configurations.

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Use Case

Diverse types of applications in various enterprise sectors, not limited to below:

● ROBO (Remote office branch office)

● Machine Vision related use cases

● Video Orchestration and Optimization

Use Case 1 

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Use Case 2

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Use Case 3

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Architecture

Targeted architecture

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Center Node (Located at Telco Cloud)

CENTER Node consists of 3 components.  MECM , AppStore and Developer Platform.  MEC Manager is the central entity in the MEC system responsible for application and service deployment in an highly distributed computing environment, it provides overall view of hosts and applications deployed in the hosts. 
MECM: comprises of MEO, MEPM & Edge Connector which performs the following task

• MEO: Maintains system level view of edges and carries out the Application orchestration to the desired Edge based on Application requirements and Edge node resource availability.  
• MEPM: It is MEP manager which carries out application life cycle management and element management for specific Edge(s).  
• Edge Connector: Enable flexible traffic offloading from the aspects of control interaction with mobile network exposed capabilities.

AppStore: It is like a market place AppStore: It is like a market place for Application developer to launch their applications.

Developer platform: It is a platform for developer to carry out development and test their applications.

EDGE NodeEdge Node (Located at Telco Edge)

Edge Node components manages  the execution of various enterprise Applications, it provides various services which can be leveraged by edge applications for smooth functioning and its planned to provide additional aPaas services like required for Machine Vision, Video Analytics , IoT Analytics etc in future releases. The MEP sites will be a single node  or a multiple node K3s Cluster, on which applications will be deployed by MECM module. The MEC Host will be hosted on a light weight OS.

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Cluster, on which applications will be deployed by MECM module. The MEC Host will be hosted on a light weight OS. Edge Node will comprise of following:

• aPaaS: Producer services for Enterprise applications to consume.
• PaaS: Platform services needed by enterprise application as well as platform components 
• MEP Services: 
  • DNS: DNS server and DNS record management service
  • Service Registry: Service registry and discovery, availability notifications
  • AppLCM & AppRuleMgr: Applications life cycle management & application rule management
• Network Capabilities: Network capabilities like location, bandwidth for application to consume
• Edge Gateway: Enable the traffic offloading from the aspects of data plane with local traffic routing, traffic management and so on

By leveraging upstream projects like EdgeGallery and In collaboration with other BP in same family "5G MEC/Slice System to Support Cloud Gaming, HD Video and Live Broadcasting" (5G MEC/Slice System to Support Cloud Gaming, HD Video and Live Broadcasting Blueprint - Tentative roadmap of integration other BP is Q3 2021), this BP intends to deliver targeted architecture.. 

Release 4 Architecture

In this release, BP has been targeted to provide Orchestration capability and application developer platform & store for easy & faster app development & onboarding, along with features like multi-tenancy, network-isolation, DNS, LB. Also have added ROBO retail enterprise specific capabilities along with sample application.

Leverage EdgeGallery as an upstream to add following components to the Stack

• Application/MEC Edge Orchestrator
• Developer Platform & Application Store.
• Developer & Tenant Portals
• Add features like network isolation, DNS support, LB.

ROBO use case integration on EALTEdge:

• PaaS: Light weight storage. Backup and Restore (scheduled backup/ disaster recovery) for Remote sites
• aPaaS: Object Detection service for Retail store Inventory
• Example App: Retail store inventory management

Below is release 4 architecture for details kindly refer platform architecture section.

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Note: In release 4 to use BP, UPF (external entity to this BP) needs to be pre-configured with DNS redirection rules and traffic rules to ensure connectivity.

ETSI MEC Alignment Status

Please refer the below figure for EALTEdge components and reference points alignment with respect to ETSI MEC .For as of Release 4. For API alignment, please refer API document.

Reference deployment and prerequisite: Required for E2E operation

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Pre-Requisites for E2E Operation (Out of BP scope): 

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Note: For release 4, Kubernetes based Infra management is supported.

Platform Architecture

The below diagram gives a overall architecture of the Enterprise Application on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge blueprint as given in Release 4. 

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EALTEdge Software Components 

Unified CLI: Command Line Interface provides the user interface to install the EALTEdge environment.

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