5G motivates the edge computing progress. Higher rate and higher density optical transceivers will be required.
Edge computing is the leading-edge technology for the next-generation data center. In the current period, edge computing is in the period of practice. It is important that how to develop edge computing and how to meet the needs of edge computing.
On Jun. 25, 2019, the OCP China Day hosted in Beijing, China by one OCP Platinum member, Inspur. The distinguished guests from Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Baidu, Tencent, and Inspur attended the conference. They share vital topics such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and SONiC about various leading-edge technologies here. Among these topics, edge computing has been frequently mentioned, here we will discuss the development of 5G and edge computing.
Source: Inspur
Edge Computing
The emerging applications and exponential data growth have been driving cloud service to extend the edge. It is difficult to cope with all the data through the cloud service due to the requirements of low latency and the limitation of bandwidth, there is no doubt that edge computing is a good way to meet the requirements of latency and save bandwidth in the network.
The Latest Exploration and Practices in the Field for Edge Computing
In this OCP China Day, Nokia, China Mobile, Baidu, Inspur and others shared the latest exploration and practices in the field for edge computing.
The “DEC” (Device, Edge, Cloud）edge computing deployment has been proposed by Baidu. While Guangjun Xie, Baidu ABC Cloud Group Cloud Computing Department General said that the cloud will reconstruct the traditional cloud computing in the future.
Tomi Männikkö, Nokia Hardware Architect also shared their exploration and practices for edge computing. He said that the edge computing is close to the client end, so it is important to ensure client experience.
Of course, the distinguished guests from other companies delivered a speech about the topic of edge computing. Here will be not mentioned.
5G Driving the Development of Edge Computing
5G motivates the edge computing progress. The Upgrading of 5G transmission network hardware technology is relatively limited. After receiving the radio signal from the base station antenna, the backhaul and longhaul through the optical communication network. On the transmission side, the improvement of hardware technology in the 5G era is relatively limited. The hardware equipment of the transmission network is still dominated by high-level switches, gateways, optical transceivers, optical fiber and cable.
The Optical Transceiver Is One of the Cores in the 5G Development
The core of the optical transceiver is the laser chip and the signal processing chip. In the telecom application, there are some problems such as heat dissipation, power consumption, wavelength dispersion to solve in the medium and long-distance transmission.
At present, 100G optical transceivers are mainstream for telecom in the medium and long-distance transmission. 200G optical transceivers and 400G optical transceivers will be used in the late of 5G. The current port density is hard to improve efficiency for network capacity and performance. Edge computing will be a part of 5G providing compute and storage resources. The core benefits of edge solutions are low latency, high bandwidth, and trusted computing and storage.
Conclusion
The advent of 5G, there are new services such as automatic driving, VR/AR and other application scenarios with the demands of low latency and high bandwidth. Smart cities and the industrial Internet also have security demands. As an important support platform for 5G business, edge computing plays an important role in 5G.
The demands for low latency and high bandwidth of 5G edge computing will be accelerated the development of optical transceivers forwarding higher rate and higher density.