How can telcos ensure resiliency at the edge?

Edge resilience, according to Volt Active Data’s Chief Product Officer Dheeraj Remella, is a ‘multi-pronged endeavor’

By utilizing edge technology, telecom operators can improve their own operations and enable new applications and use cases; however, the edge must be close to the premises in order to deliver low latency. Further, managing, securing and backing up multiple edge locations is no small task. At the Telco and Edge Forum, panelists discussed how telcos and their partners can ensure that their edge locations remain resilient as they continue to evolve and scale their edge efforts.

Edge resilience: A ‘multi-pronged endeavor’

First things first, said Volt Active Data’s Chief Product Officer Dheeraj Remella: you cannot run all of your resilience in the same edge because it’s a constrained environment. “It defeats the purpose of resilience because [if] the edge location goes, your resilience [on that edge] goes,” he continued. “So, how do you actually transfer from edge to edge and be able to transfer the control from a downed edge to a nearby edge peer, so to speak?”

Another challenge, according to Remella? Moving assets. “If assets are moving, how do you determine which edge is the closest to a given asset? … How do you control that asset’s home edge versus roam edge?” he questioned.

Edge resilience, then, is a “multi-pronged” endeavor. “It’s hardware, software, data center people, processes. It’s a comprehensive view that you need to … plan for,” Remella said. A possible example of such a plan might be an “archipelago architecture” in which nearby edges back each other up, with “clusters” of geographically distributed archipelagos that form “the resiliency basis” for your edge network.

Leveraging eSIM and Multi-IMSI

At KORE Wireless, edge resiliency is established using the SIM or eSIM — a digital version of the physical SIM card. “We use … Multi-IMSI [Multiple International Mobile Subscriber Identities], which allows us in roaming [to have] multiple networks in a certain country,” explained the company’s VP of CaaS Delivery Ronald Weststrate. “That’s one level of resilience. But also, these roaming sponsors that we use, we piggyback on their roaming agreements.” He added that when an issue pops up with one of these roaming sponsors, KORE can use another sponsor. “So, it might not even be that a local network is down, but it might be that a roaming sponsor has an issue in the path back to our core network.” As such, KORE Wireless considers Multi-IMSI to be a “very important tool” for ensuring resiliency.

Weststrate further detailed a scenario in which an eSIM is used in combination with local profile management provides additional resiliency: “Imagine a truck … driving through the U.S. Let’s say normally [it’s] using an AT&T profile, very happy with that, and then you hit a blind spot… Then, locally, you can switch to a secondary profile already on the SIM. Of course, that might be Verizon or might be your global connectivity profile … So, you then have a secondary profile on the card to ensure you got resiliency.”

Intelligent infrastructure

For Ravi Sinha, the VP of TechDev and solutions at Reliance Jio, the emphasis on resilience should be centered around the telco infrastructure itself. “That also includes my RAN pieces, that also includes my software modules have RAN, that also includes the core modules or any kind of authentication model, whatever is needed … locally,” he said, adding, though, that the economic restraints of communications infrastructure can sometimes compromise resiliency at the telco edge.

He also is hoping that in as little as two or three years to see artificial intelligence not just through the physical level stack and orchestration, but also in the end-to-end orchestration of the entire edge slice, from the code to transport to the RAN as well. And further, he hopes that this injection of end-to-end AI is done in such a way that “resilience is given a high priority.”

A strong cloud-to-edge continuum

Finally, Deutsche Telekom’s roduct Manager Edge Computing & Innovations Yamina Kelm claimed that in order to have a strong “fallback option” for your edge locations, it’s critical to build a “strong cloud-to-edge continuum,” where all network components feed into one another in an effective and efficient way. Part of achieving this is deploying the right solution is in the right place. “You … need to distinguish what do you want to achieve when putting a workload on a specific infrastructure and in of how the application looks like and what the application needs, you need to decide which one’s the best fitting for your purposes,” she said.