Sophia Antipolis, 28 March 2017

Addressing current and future heterogeneous networks

ETSI’s Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group has a new name, a new leadership team and a new scope that extends beyond its original focus on Mobile Edge Computing for mobile access networks.

At the 9th meeting of ETSI MEC, held on 13-17 March in Sophia Antipolis, France, Alex Reznik from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was elected as the new chairman. Pekka Kuure and Sami Kekki, respectively from Nokia and Huawei, were elected as new vice chairs, while Adrian Neal, from Vodafone, was re-elected as vice chair.

ETSI’s Mobile Edge Computing Industry Specification Group has been renamed to Multi-access Edge Computing to embrace the challenges in the second phase of work and better reflect non-cellular operators’ requirements. The scope of the group has expanded to address multiple MEC hosts being deployed in many different networks, owned by various operators and running edge applications in a collaborative manner. Future work will take into account heterogeneous networks using LTETM, 5G, fixed and WiFi technologies. Additional features of the current work include developer friendly and standard APIs, standards based interfaces among multi-access hosts and an alignment with NFV architecture.

The MEC system will provide a standardized and open system able to support different virtualization techniques, with the capability for an application to discover applications and services available on other hosts, and to direct requests and data to one or more hosts. These features among others will lead to a system offering standard APIs, management interfaces with orchestrator and virtualized infrastructure, standardized interfaces between MEC hosts for traffic as well as service routing or application relocation, and standardized interfaces with transport networks.

“In phase 2, we are expanding our horizons and addressing challenges associated with the multiplicity of hosts and stakeholders. The goal is to enable a complete multi-access edge computing system able to address the wide range of use cases which require edge computing, including IoT,” says Alex Reznik, chairman of MEC ISG. “We will continue to work closely with 3GPP, ETSI NFV ISG and other SDOs as well as key industry organizations to ensure that edge computing applications can be developed to a standardized, broadly adopted platform.”

ETSI ISGs are open to members and non-members. If you want to join as a participant, see our pdfparticipant agreement.

About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose over 800 member companies and organizations, drawn from 67 countries, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work.

Contact
Claire Boyer
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Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org
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