Interdigital claims first trial of mobile edge computing using 5G architecture

Networking tech outfit Interdigital has announced what it claims is the first mobile edge computing 5G network architecture trial in Bristol, UK.

The joint-public consumer trial was conducted in partnership with Bristol is Open and independent TV production company CTVC. It took the form of a smartphone-driven ‘treasure hunt’ in the centre of Bristol in which participants had to solve puzzles formed in part from live video.

The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate improvements to video latency as a result of all this MEC over new IP networking technology goodness. The trial claimed latency reductions of several milliseconds and video distribution six times more efficient than over standard IP tech.

“Latency reduction, higher bandwidth utilization, and the ability to deploy such services very close to end users rather than in some distant cloud are crucial to the success of MEC services,” said Dirk Trossen, Senior Principal Engineer at InterDigital.”

“Deploying services so close to end users is crucial to enable new services at the network edge but even more important is doing so without the need for deploying own infrastructure in operators’ networks”, said Stuart Porter of CTVC.

The trial was ultimately designed to showcase InterDigital’s ‘flexible IP services’, which is abbreviated to FLIPS. Warming to the spurious acronym theme we are told the trial also contributes to a couple of EU Horizon 2020 projects called POINT and FLAME. Click on the hyperlinks to see just how forced or indeed unexplained those acronyms are and the video below gives you a taste of the larks that were had.