IBM, Nokia Siemens Networks Develope Mobile Edge Computing Platform

Nokia Siemens Networks and IBM have announced a collaboration to deliver a mobile edge computing platform that can run applications directly within a mobile base station.

The new platform will be able to deliver content directly from the base station, reducing backhaul traffic, and potentially reducing delivery latency when content is cached locally.

Improved latency can enable high-value vertical solutions that rely on big data-driven analytics to work on very large amounts of information in real time.

 For example, IBM’s City in Motion solution can analyze radio information to estimate how people are moving through a city, identify their mode of transport, and configure a cities transport network in real time to ensure optimum performance.

The company’s Radio Applications Cloud Server (RACS) integrates IBM’s ASPN platform and provides a standards-based cloud runtime environment, and is designed to allow mobile operators to deploy, run and integrate applications to the mobile edge.

“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, vice president, 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 centralized cloud.”