EU standards group to build an MEC sandbox
A major European Union standards organization has picked a Delaware-based company to build an edge sandbox in which vendors can learn about and experiment with multi-access edge computing application programming interfaces.
The nonprofit European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) awarded a contract Feb. 7 to build an online edge-emulation environment to InterDigital Inc., a mobile- and video-technology research-and-development firm. The value of the contract was not announced. The project’s name is Specialist Task Force 587, and it will conclude in December 2020.
A sandbox is a common term among technology companies for a computer environment created expressly to simulate computer, telecommunications, and electronic environments. Vendors put their products — in this case multi-access edge computing (MEC) products — in such environments to see how they perform on their own, linked with other products or both under preset conditions.
Sandboxes can take some of the guesswork out of product development, particularly if the products are destined for complex, heterogeneous environments. This sandbox is expected to be deployed on the institute’s Forge site. ETSI Forge, as it is known, offers software tools made collaboratively by institute members for download.
InterDigital technical personnel will work with the institute’s MEC Decode Working Group to assemble the sandbox using agile methods. Companies taking part in trial simulations will be able to experiment with standardized edge service application-program interfaces in simulated urban and indoor settings over fixed, WLAN, 3GPP, and other networks.
Officials in the France-based institute cited InterDigital’s work with MEC and edge-emulation technology as a key factor in making their choice. InterDigital is a member of the institute.
InterDigital is obligated, as part of the contract, to deliver a set of sandbox emulation scenarios along with an emulation engine with which to realize those scenarios, a Web interface for users and, of course, the sandbox itself.
Not all of the institute’s efforts are quite as immediately practical. Late last month, officials named a chair and first vice-chair to a group that will come up with industry specifications to prevent an artificial intelligence application from becoming malicious on its own.
More than 850 organizations from 65 nations make up the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Member companies include Boeing, Huawei Technologies, Oracle Corp. and Samsung.
Article Topics
3GPP | edge computing | edge platforms | ETSI | Europe | InterDigital | MEC | standards | wireless | WLAN
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