Local Break-out that doesn’t break the network… and a stepping stone to 5G!

Athonet gives us a tour of their mobile-edge solution in collaboration with Qwilt and Orange Athonet launched its innovative Mobile Edge Offload (SGW-LBO) solution at the Mobile World Congress. The solution was demonstrated in collaboration with Qwilt, the video caching solution provider, and Orange. SGW-LBO (SGW Local Break Out) is a software function/VNF that, deployed close to the RAN, provides a local secure network for placing locally offloaded content and services. Operators are seeing that a lot of their traffic, and in some cases as high as 60-70%, is video traffic. Our solution allows this secure content to be cached and served locally. This improves user perceived quality and reduces the amount of backhaul required in a network. It may also enable new business with content providers and other low latency services. The SGW-LBO is a modified SGW function which has been enhanced by Athonet to allow traffic to be broken-out and steered locally to support i) caching of video and other content and ii) other applications that require low latency or local offload (smartcity, autonomous cars etc.). The benefit of this approach is that it allows specific traffic (not all traffic) to be offloaded for key applications that are implemented at the network edge without impacting the existing network or breaking network security. It also provides a bridge and upgrade path to 5G where the User Plane Function can be deployed flexibly at the network edge. We therefore believe that it is the optimal enabler for MEC (Mobile Edge Computing).