MEC Congress, Berlin, Germany, 25 September 2017

Leading organizations in fog and multi-access edge computing sign MOU to share work related to global standards development for fog-enabled mobile edge applications and technologies

ETSI and the OpenFog Consortium will collaborate to develop fog-enabled mobile edge applications and technologies.

The two organizations have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with intent to benefit organizations working to develop 5G, mission-critical and data-dense applications through fog computing and networking and thus reduce technical overlap across the multitude of domains.

“ This OpenFog-ETSI MOU is a significant step in our efforts to build interoperability for efficient and reliable networks and intelligent endpoints operating along the Cloud-to-Things continuum, ” said Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium and Senior Director, Cisco. “ We’re now positioned to leverage our respective work to give the industry a cohesive set of standards around fog computing in mobile environments, while eliminating any redundancy in our respective efforts. ”

“ Establishing a cooperation framework with OpenFog represents a significant step towards adoption of our standards by the industry, ” said Alex Reznik, Chairman of ETSI MEC ISG. “ This alignment of a leading industry consortium and a leading standards setting organization in the fog/edge space should make it easier for both application developers and infrastructure solution providers to develop towards a common, open and interoperable edge computing environment. ”

OpenFog will work with the ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group (ISG). The two organizations will cooperate on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) standardization and interoperability requirements by sharing and applying selected technical work in process. MEC’s work addresses multiple multi-access edge hosts deployed by different operator-owned networks which run edge applications in a collaborative manner. The OpenFog Reference Architecture will extend the mobile edge with a physical and logical multi-layered network hierarchy of cooperating fog nodes that interface between cloud and edge, allowing for interoperability across operators.

One of the first initiatives from the agreement will be focused on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which support edge computing interoperability. The recently released package of MEC APIs contain important properties that can be adapted and used in the OpenFog reference infrastructure. The ETSI MEC specifications also include API framework which provides a framework for delivering services to be consumed or offered by locally hosted or remote authorized applications. By adopting and re-using APIs across the OpenFog and MEC architectures, it will be easier for developers to create common architectures, unify management strategies, and write a single application software modules that run on both OpenFog and MEC architectures.

About the OpenFog Consortium

The OpenFog Consortium was formed to accelerate the deployment of fog computing technologies through the development of an open architecture that identifies core technologies and capabilities such as distributed computing, networking and storage that will support intelligence at the edge of IoT. The OpenFog Consortium was formed by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft Corp, and Princeton University in November 2015, and has members in North America, Europe and Asia.