Open Networking Summit North America 2018

A telco transformation is underway. As part of this, a re-thinking of the cloud is necessary, one where we move from a centralized cloud computing paradigm to a distributed one. Moving the resources closer to consumers reduces the round-trip latency, paving the way for new service offerings. The distributed cloud architecture for the mobile edge, which will serve a wide variety of use cases, needs to support mobility, as well as network slicing. In addition, while traditional cloud architectures have compute and storage as main resource groups with networking playing a secondary role, the roles they play in the mobile edge cloud need to be flipped. This is because, the mobile edge aims to facilitate better user experiences and operator economics by enhancing access technologies, thereby placing a primary role for SDN. However, most frameworks to date have the given the primary role to NFV. This talk will provide an overview of mobile edge cloud, and discuss design principles in determining the roles cloud, SDN and NFV will play in it.