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The evolution and rapid progression of new technologies like augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, drones, and smart cities are inevitable. The enormous amount of data produced and processed at the user end of the network is huge, and the subsequent communication between the cloud and distributed endpoints becomes cumbersome. To store and manage a large amount of data produced, and to process data in real-time becomes a challenge.
The demand for real-time processing capabilities at the edge , instead of centralized processing , and the high capacity storage needs can be addressed with Edge Computing. Edge Computing enables processing and storage capabilities closer to the endpoint using familiar cloud technologies. This approach will reduce the total cost of ownership and enable faster processing to meet application latency (< 20 ms) requirements. The Edge Cloud solution will also comply with local and global data privacy requirements.
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Akraino Edge Stack, a Linux Foundation project initiated by AT&T and Intel, provides intend to develop a fully integrated edge infrastructure solution, and the project is completely focused towards Edge Computing. This open source software stack provides critical infrastructure to enable high performance, reduce latency, improve availability, lower operational overhead, provide scalability, address security needs, and improve fault management. The Edge infrastructure solution will support Akraino community will address multiple edge use cases and industry, not just Telco Industry. Akraino community intended to develop solution and support of carrier, provider and the IoT networks.
AT&T's seed code will enable carrier-scale edge computing applications to run in virtual machines and containers. AT&T’s contributions, which will include support for 5G, IoT, and other networking edge services will enhance reliability and enable high performance.
Intel’s contribution will include open source components, namely its Intel upstreamed Wind River Titanium Cloud portfolio of technologies and Intel Network Edge Virtualization Software Development Kit (Intel NEV SDK). Wind River Titanium Cloud’s compact and performant technology enables ease of deployment and operational efficiency. The Intel NEV SDK provides a suite of reference libraries and APIs to enable different edge-computing solution deployment architectures for small cells, macro cells, wireline, aggregation sites, and central offices.to open source in support of additional blueprints in Akraino.
The Akraino Edge Stack project community, while embracing several existing open source projects, will continue the focus on the following Community Goal:
▪ Faster Edge Innovation - Focused group facilitating faster innovation, incorporating hardware acceleration, software-defined networking, and other emerging capabilities into a modern Edge stack.
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▪ Support Production-Ready CodeCode - Security established by design and supports full life-cycle.
Akraino is a complementary opensource project, and interfaces with the existing projects namely Acumos AI, Airship, Ceph, DANOS, EdgeX Foundry, Kubernetes, LF Networking, ONAP, OpenStack, and StarlingX.
Emerging Technologies
Emerging technologies in Internet of Things (IoT) demands lower latencies and accelerated processing at the edge.
As highlighted in the Introduction section, there are several emerging technologies such as (Refer the picture below)
- Telco NFV Edge Infrastructure - Running cloud infrastructure at the network edge allows for the virtualization of applications key to running 5G mobility networks at a greater scale, density and lower cost using commodity hardware. This infrastructure also enables the virtualization of wireline services, Enterprise IP services and even supports the virtualization of client premises equipment. This
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- reduces the time to provision new services for customers and even, in some cases, allows those customers to self-provision their service changes.
- Autonomous
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- devices - Drones, Autonomous Vehicles, Industry Robots and such customer devices require a lot
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- of compute processing power in order to support video processing, analytics and etc., Edge computing enables above-said devices to offload the computing processing to the Edge within the needed latency limit.
- Immersive Experiences - Devices like Virtual Reality (VR) headsets and
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- Augmented Reality applications on user’s mobile devices also require extremely low levels of latency to prevent lag that would degrade their user experience. To ensure this experience is optimal, placing computing resources close to the end user to ensure the lowest latencies to and from their devices is critical.
- IoT & Analytics - Emerging technologies in Internet of Things (IoT) demands lower latencies and accelerated processing at the edge.
To ensure timely information arrives for data-driven decisions for manufacturing and shipping businesses, edge computing is also beneficial. Receiving and processing this data at the edge allows more timely decision making leading to better business outcomes.
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