It was
mid 2013 when we published one of the first visionary papers on EdgeCloud, in
the IEEE Communications Magazine.
After
six years, MEC/EdgeCloud indefinitely under the spot in industry,
worldwide. In fact, MEC/EdgeCloud is expected to play a key
strategic role in this Digital Transformation towards 5G.
There
are evidences that, today, Network and Service Providers are exploring
different strategies for MEC/Edge Cloud introduction and exploitation, mainly
(but not only) motivated by the potential opportunities for: (i) saving costs
in the Digital Transformation of the network and service infrastructures; (ii)
generating new revenues, e.g., by improving performance of current services and
enabling new ones, with the related business models.
These
topics are addressed by several standardization bodies and fora.
A non-
exhaustive list includes:
ETSI MEC
OpenFog
ONF CORD
Telecom Infra Project (WGs on Edge Computing)
EdgeX Foundry
Open Edge Computing
MobiledgeX
Akraino
In general, the overall standardization picture is rather fragmented but
these bodies are addressing MEC/Edge from different perspectives (they are not
fully overlapping) and there is a common awareness that global interoperability
is a “must” for enabling new services ecosystems.
This
means that Industry need to align on open and common APIs capable to ease
Service and Apps Developers: in fact, this is crucial to promotes innovation
and accelerates development by Third Parties applications and services, capable
of enabling Network and Service Providers to capitalize on their investments on
EdgeCloud.
