• Mobile edge computing will need breakout at the edge
• Vasona to show its MEC SmartAIR Edge Services Platform
• Will demo breakout and mobile edge computing using a games application

So-called RAN or ‘edge’ breakout solutions will make a timely appearance on the stands and in the meeting rooms at MWC.

Think about Multi-Access Edge Computing (as Mobile Edge Computing has renamed itself for broadening purposes) and it becomes obvious that you need to apply some sort of triage to the data traffic as it hits the network edge so that the relevant low latency data flows can be identified and separated from the hoi polloi data and delivered to a local cloud.

Several companies are certain to be talking about this ‘breakout’ in Barcelona. Here’s one and we’ll cover more before and at the show.

Vasona Networks has today announced ‘Edge Breakout’, which it tags as ‘for delivery of blazing fast services over congested LTE networks’. Vasona says it intends to demonstrate Edge Breakout’s ability to deliver cellular-based, console-like gaming experiences to a smartphone or tablet at MWC with cloud gaming innovator LiquidSky.

Yes, this is ‘just’  LTE at the moment and it’s demonstrating a gaming application, but you have to start somewhere. This is one of those ‘supporting operators on the path to 5G’ exercises. Vasona says that this is just one of several available applications on its MEC SmartAIR Edge Services Platform. It claims Edge Breakout exposes Vasona’s real-time cell insight and traffic management capabilities to allow third-party applications to “break out” the traffic from its path near the edge and deliver it to a secure, local cloud. When combined with Vasona’s traffic management to handle mobile congestion, it claims, fast transmission times result in consistent quality and seamless experiences for the end user.

Vasona will be showing (Hall 6, M40)  a graphics-intensive, first-person game hosted entirely in the edge cloud by LiquidSky, connected via a mobile network and controlled by a tablet or smartphone. In the demo the gaming traffic on the RAN is broken out and redirected to a locally-hosted, secure virtual gateway that directs the traffic to an optimized, dedicated IP network. That traffic is then sent directly to the server for processing and direct communication with edge-based graphic processing units (GPUs). It is then encapsulated and sent back to the device client for real-time, low-latency transactions based on real-time metadata about localized usage, security and end-user quality of service (QoS).

Vasona and its demo will be showing at Hall 6, M40, Mobile World Congress