NSN, IBM push intelligence to the edge

Infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks and IT giant IBM focused on moving intelligence to the network edge on Monday with the unveiling of a mobile edge computing platform designed to run applications within the mobile base station.

The concept is designed to take some of the strain off network and speed delivery and localisation of services. Lower latency presence-based services enabled by the platform might be gaming, augmented reality or location specific information such as traffic updates.

NSN’s Liquid Applications portfolio will be providing a foundation built on by IBM’s experience in big data driven analytics to deliver an offering with relevance beyond the telco sector. The example used in the announcement describes how IBM technology can analyse data collected by the network to estimate how many people are moving through the city, by which mode of transport and location, allowing city planners to optimise the transport network.

NSN believes the model will allow operators to create new value from mobile network investments.

“Pushing applications, processing and storage to the edge of the mobile network allows large complex problems to be distributed into many smaller and more manageable pieces and to be physically located at the source of the information it needs to work on,” said Phil Buckellew, VP IBM mobile enterprise. “This enables a huge amount of rich data to be processed in real time that would be prohibitively complex and costly to deliver on a traditional centralised cloud.”