The emerging drone industry is undergoing significant growth and innovation. It provides services to a wide range of industries and applications, including security, safety and defense, disaster response, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, measurement and inspection in constructions, shipping logistics, land surveying and mapping, aerial photography and video, etc. The variety of applications for drones is expected to expand.

The drone industry is leveraging continued advances in technology, including improved battery life, better obstacle avoidance systems, enhanced camera capabilities, specialized sensors, communications and the integration of artificial intelligence for autonomous flight and data analysis.

The integration of 5G technology with drones opens up new possibilities and revolutionizes the capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in terms of connectivity, remote operation, and collaboration between drones (drone swarms), etc. Furthermore, the 5G edge brings significant value to the drone industry by enabling low latency and reliability, providing scalable and efficient processing capabilities of data from their onboard sensors and camaras, ensuring data privacy and security and improving autonomy in drones that allows them to make faster and more intelligent decisions locally – without relying on continuous communication with a central server. This is particularly essential for critical real-time decisions required, for example, for safety applications. It also allows drones to react faster to changing environmental conditions and unexpected events. For example, they can adjust their flight paths, avoid obstacles or change their mission parameters in real time.



I had the great pleasure to represent the MEC ISG as ETSI MEC ISG chair and to present Mobile Edge Computing at the co-located 5G Observatory and Fog Networking conferences that took place on March 8-11, 2016 in Paris. Philip Lamoureux from Juniper represented the ISG at the MPLS+SDN+NFV world congress. Both congresses were endorsed by ETSI.
The congress attracted 1500+ attendees, coming from 65 countries, with a strong presence of service providers.



The ETSI Mobile Edge Computing Industry Specification Group opens the door to wider innovation and value creation.

What is Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)?

MEC offers IT service and cloud-computing capabilities at the edge of the mobile network in an environment that is characterized by proximity, ultra-low latency and high bandwidth. Furthermore, it provides exposure to real-time radio network and context information.

Imagine how all this can be intelligently leveraged by applications to transform the mobile-broadband experience.