Page 98 - ITU-T Focus Group IMT-2020 Deliverables

3 ITU-T Focus Group IMT-2020 Deliverables

NFV Release 3 features are defined matching market demand and associated work items have been studied
including, Charging, billing and accounting, Policy management, End-to-end management, Multi-site NFV
services, VNF lifecycle management and so forth.
6.1.3 Standardization activities at ETSI ISG MEC

The future broadband networks need to cover wide range of key use cases from ultra-low latency services to
massive IoT. In order to respond to demands on expected throughput, latency, scalability and
programmability, ETSI established an Industry Specification Group on Mobile Edge Computing in 2014.

ETSI ISG MEC develops a standardized and open environment that offers distributed cloud-computing
capabilities and an IT service environment to application developers and content providers. By February
2016, the group has finalized three stage 2 specifications: Terminology, Technical Requirements and the
Framework and Reference Architecture. Currently the ISG works on specifications of the following work
items:
• MEC platform Application Enablement;

• MEC API principles and guidelines;
• MEC Services APIs for Radio Network Information, Location, UE identity and Bandwidth
management;

• MEC system, host and platform management;
• MEC lifecycle and policy management;
• MEC UE application interface;
• Deployment of MEC in a NFV environment;
• End-to-end Mobility

By offering distributed cloud-computing capabilities and exposure to real-time radio network and context
information, the MEC environment is characterized by:
• Ultra-low latency: Mobile Edge services can be run close to the end user devices to provide the
lowest possible latency

• Proximity: Being close to the source of information, Mobile Edge Computing is particularly useful to
capture key information for analytics and big data
• High Bandwidth: Mobile Edge location at the edge of the network combined with the use of real
time radio network information can be used to optimize the bandwidth for the applications
• Location awareness: Mobile Edge can leverage the low-level signalling information to determine
the location of each connected device
• Real time insight into radio network and context information: Real-time network data can be used
by the applications and services to offer context-related services.
MEC can bring significant improvement of mobile user’s Quality of Experience on latency or QoS sensitive
services. The example use cases include Edge Video Orchestration, Mobile Video Throughput guidance,
Augmented reality, Intelligent Video Analytics, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication etc.
MEC enables the implementation of mobile edge applications as software-only entities that run on top of a
virtualisation infrastructure, which is located in or close to the network edge.
Figure 1 depicts the MEC framework according to ETSI GS MEC 003 specification.

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