Author: Katherine Barabash, David Breitgand and Avi Weit, IBM
5GZORRO architecture is created to enable several advanced multi-provider 5G use cases. One of the use cases, Pervasive vCDN Services put forward by INTRACOM, is depicted in the figure below. The use case calls for on-demand provisioning of additional service resources based on user requests load, so that the additional resources can belong to a 3rd party resource provider. As a result, the original Network Slice provisioned for the service is extended to span more than one resource provider in a way transparent to service users. Such seamless Network Slice extension relies on quite a few capabilities of the 5GZORRO architecture that deserve separate discussion each. In this post, we focus on one specific technology enabler created by the project team, namely the 5GZORRO Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Platform shown in the use case figure as “MEC Host”.
We stop to briefly recall the related terminology. ETSI GS MEC 001 (link) defines the glossary of terms around the MEC technology and defines MEC System as a collection of MEC hosts and MEC management necessary to run MEC applications; MEC Host as an entity that contains a MEC platform and a virtualisation infrastructure which provides compute, storage and network resources to MEC applications; MEC platform as a collection of functionality that is required to run MEC applications on a specific MEC host virtualisation infrastructure and to enable them to provide and consume MEC services, and that can provide itself a number of MEC services; and MEC Management as a MEC system level management, i.e. the collection of management components which have the overview of the complete MEC system, and MEC host level management, i.e. the collection of components which handle the management of the MEC specific functionality of a particular MEC platform, MEC host and the MEC applications running on it.
