ETSI Blog

MEC for Drones Panel: Unlocking 5G Edge Value for the Drone Industry

2023-08-10 Posted by Nurit Sprecher, NOKIA 407 Hits

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.

A nice discussion with various speakers on Telco Edge Cloud evolution toward NaaS

2023-06-15 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 670 Hits

Hi MEC community!

I am back again with a quick blog post, as I simply wanted to attract your attention to a nice Industry Panel that I had the pleasure and honor to organize at the IEEE ICC 2023 conference. This panel was on “Telco Edge Cloud evolution toward Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)”, and I was there also with my role of Chairman of ETSI MEC, and inviting many speakers coming from various companies and industry organizations, and also representing various projects (e.g. GSMA and CAMARA, to mention a few).
In fact, as most of you well know, MEC is involved in a standardization activity (also in alignment with 3GPP) to put in place MEC Federation standards, also by considering the requirements from GSMA OPG (Operator Platform Group). The effort from the industry is also including open source and other business agreements, thus not only standards! 
That’s the reason for this great panel, i.e. bringing together various voices, also from partners, hyperscalers, and (why not!) also discuss legal implications for these multi-party collaborations. As we discussed at the panel, the ecosystem of NaaS stakeholders is thus quite huge and heterogeneous, including operators, edge service providers, cloud providers, vertical segments, SW companies, open-source and developers communities, etc… So, definitely, the common intention is to collaborate.
The final goal will be certainly to provide more value globally to MEC ecosystem and all end-users!  Enjoy the slides from the panel (here). 

Stay tuned also for any further news and updates on this topic, if you are interested! 

MEC can serve multiple vertical markets

2022-12-21 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 530 Hits

Hello folks, I have again to ask apologies for my not-very-frequent blog posts, but really this 2022 is (was) a dense and interesting year! A lot of nice developments and progresses from MEC, as the group is ramping up with Phase 3 work (BTW, stay tuned for the forthcoming announcements on many outstanding deliverables!). In the meantime, I just wanted to inform you that at the MEC#32 plenary the ISG has approved the updated publication in our MEC Leadership webpage (here) with the list of recently appointed LS Officers for the Vertical Industries. They can be our ambassadors, to support on the dialogue with various organizations: in fact, as we know MEC is serving multiple use cases and vertical industries, and ETSI ISG MEC has already established collaborations with a number of external organizations (e.g. automotive), and plans to increase the other domains (e.g. industrial automation, drones, CDN/videostreaming..). Here, I expect nice progresses from the dialogue with these verticals, also related to possible impacts on the Work Item MEC 043 about “Abstracted Radio Network Information for Industries” (the study item will study use cases, key issues and recommendations related to exposing abstracted radio network information for the industries).

Finally, I wanted to exploit the opportunity to wish you all a good Holiday break. Please take care, enjoy a deserved rest, and recharge your batteries, looking forward for a great 2023!

How much MEC progressed (Spoiler: quite a lot)

2022-03-21 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 1303 Hits

Hello again, and sorry for not writing so frequently. A lot of things happened in these busy months!

ISG MEC have updated some key Phase 2 specifications, and it is continuously progressing on the current Phase 3 work. I can only say “kudos” to the rapporteurs and actual leaders of this tremendous amount of work (you can find more information in the recent ETSI press release, and also details in this pdfshort summary.

MEC towards multi-cloud federation

2021-12-06 Posted by Dario SABELLA, MEC Chair 1698 Hits

A lot of time has passed since my last blog post, sorry for not reaching out to you, folks! Very busy period. Also, a lot of nice things are happening, and ISG MEC is continuously growing in membership, attracting new companies that are actively contributing to the standardization.

Our collaboration with 5GAA (now joining MEC!) is also well established with the identification of two MEC observers, Maxime Flament (CTO, 5GAA) and Luca Boni (Stellantis) who are acting as 5GAA representatives in MEC. The collaboration with Akraino is now also moving forward with the guidance of Jane Shen (Mavenir, Akraino TSC member and ETSI MEC Technical Expert) and Oleg Berzin (Equinix, Akraino TSC Co-Chair and PCEI PTL). Finally, we’ve recently held the 2021 edition of the MEC Hackathon (see results here, published as part of our renewed MEC Wiki page, https://mecwiki.etsi.org/).The MEC Sandbox is continuously updated with new functionalities, also used for the MEC Hackathon.

Working towards moving the industry forward together

2019-11-04 Posted by Alex Reznik, Chair of MEC ISG 6866 Hits

Quite some time has passed since my last blog entry, and while I thought about a new blog a number of times, a good topic – i.e. one which is appropriate for discussion in a short, informal and public format - just did not seem to present itself. That’s not for the lack of interest or activity in MEC. 2019 is shaping up to be a critical year in which many operators are now public about their plans for edge computing, initial deployments are appearing and, as expected, holes in what the industry has been working on are beginning to be found (witness the much publicized and excellent Telefonica presentation at last month’s Edge Compute Congress). It’s just that it’s hard to blog about on-going work, even when it is very active, much less about internal efforts of various players in MEC. After all, what would that look like “this is hard and we are working hard on it…”

Nevertheless, the time has come. Those of you who follow my random MEC thoughts on a semi-regular basis might recall the subject of that last post ages ago (I mean in February): the need for both a vibrant Open Source community and Standards development in a space like MEC; and how the two are complimentary in that the focus is, by definition, on complimentary problems. And, if you don’t follow me religiously, here is the link: https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/do-we-still-need-standards-in-the-age-of-open-source, grab a coffee, tea, a…. whatever … and read up!