Evolving 5G: ANIARA, an Edge-Cloud perspective

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and solutions for deploying low-latency 5G services on edge-cloud networks, emphasizing lightweight containerization, smart monitoring, resource orchestration, privacy, and power management.

Contribution

It introduces an edge-cloud perspective for evolving 5G, highlighting novel lightweight solutions and strategies for resource management, privacy, and power efficiency in distributed edge networks.

Findings

Proposes lightweight containerization methods for edge networks.

Suggests smart monitoring strategies with reduced overhead.

Highlights the importance of power management at the edge.

Abstract

Emerging use-cases like smart manufacturing and smart cities pose challenges in terms of latency, which cannot be satisfied by traditional centralized networks. Edge networks, which bring computational capacity closer to the users/clients, are a promising solution for supporting these critical low latency services. Different from traditional centralized networks, the edge is distributed by nature and is usually equipped with limited connectivity and compute capacity. This creates a complex network to handle, subject to failures of different natures, that requires novel solutions to work in practice. To reduce complexity, more lightweight solutions are needed for containerization as well as smart monitoring strategies with reduced overhead. Orchestration strategies should provide reliable resource slicing with limited resources, and intelligent scaling while preserving data privacy in a distributed fashion. Power management is also critical, as providing and managing a large amount of power at the edge is unprecedented.