Section: Application Domains

Network Virtualization and Mobile Edge Services.

Telecom operators have been among the first to advocate the deployment of massively geo-distributed infrastructures, in particular through working groups such as Mobile Edge Computing at the European Telecommunication Standards Institute(http://www.etsi.org/news-events/news/1078-2016-04-etsi-mobile-edge-computing-publishes-foundation-specifications.). The initial reason is that geo-distributed infrastructures will enable Telecom operators to virtualize a large part of their resources and thus reduce capital and operational costs. As an example, we are investigating through the I/O Lab, the joint lab between Orange and Inria, how can a Centralized Radio Access Networks (a.k.a. C-RAN or Cloud-RAN) be supported for 5G networks. We highlight that our expertise is not on the network side but rather on where and how we can deploy, allocate and reconfigure software components, which are mandatory to operate a C-RAN infrastructure, in order to guarantee the quality of service expected by the end-users. Finally, working with actors from the network community is a valuable advantage for a distributed system research group such as STACK. Indeed, achievements made within one of the two communities serve the other.