Developers at MEC Hackathon challenged to trial edge computing for 5G at the Droidcon virtual event

Sophia Antipolis, 10 December 2020

The successful last edition of MEC Hackathons endorsed by ETSI took place on 25 to 26 November and was hosted by Droidcon Italy 2020 as a fully virtual event. The competition was open for developers to test their applications with ETSI MEC APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in a variety of use cases. The organizing committee received a total of 14 submissions, including several topics, from Augmented Reality for Construction Sector, to consumer, media and entertainment application, to automotive services. Admitted teams were offered remote access to MEC servers and software platforms to develop mobile applications for advanced services in MEC-enabled 5G networks, using ETSI MEC technologies. They were also required to onboard their applications in real-life MEC systems and connect with the MEC APIs to receive simulated in-network data.

The Droidcon MEC Hackathon 2020 was organized by Intel, CISCO, TIM, Equinix and LINKS Foundation, and endorsed by ETSI and with the support of GSMA and Turin City.

Dario Sabella, Vice Chair of ETSI ISG MEC commented: “All these MEC Hackathons revealed talented teams who have experienced the benefits gained from using real MEC platforms and MEC APIs in their edge computing applications. It’s exciting to note how this community keeps on creating interoperable systems that will bring the full benefits of MEC to emerging 5G services.

Hackathon outcomes: exciting MEC Apps and APIs developed!

An award ceremony was organized at the Droidcon Italy 2020 conference.

The MEC Hackathon winner, UniMore, showcased a project on Cognitive mobility at the Edge, an automotive application solution exploiting features and services provided by the 5G MEC architecture (including a MEC Location API) in order to deliver low-latency location-based event notifications about traffic, congestion forecast, and mobility patterns.

The UniMore team is composed by very experienced Droidcon Hackathon developers and researchers at the Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Among the other prizes, the Hackathon winner will be offered the possibility to participate to the Smart Road project (a consortium of partners, from car makers, network operators, universities and the City of Turin), with the aim of proposing their developed solution as possible implementation for testing activities in the Turin urban environment. In this perspective, the UniMore Team plans for future activities including the possibility to extend the integration with additional MEC APIs and to measure performance considering Digital Twins and microservices oriented architectures and applications scenarios.