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The purpose of the Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint family is to specify a set of open APIs for Telco Edge Blueprints to expose towards Public Cloud Service Provider instances at the Edge. As Public Cloud Service Providers deploy Edge instances to better serve their end-users and applications, Telco Edge deployments offer many opportunities for collaboration by exposing their network capabilities to provide value added services.

The need to interface and exchange information through these open APIs will allow competitive offerings for Consumers, Enterprises, and Vertical Industry end-user segments. For instance, open APIs will be provided between Telcos and public cloud edge compute platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Anthos, AliCloud Edge Node Service (ENS), AWS Wavelength, Microsoft Azure Edge Zones, Tencent Edge Computing Machine (ECM), to name a few. These APIs are not limited to providing basic connectivity services but will include the ability to deliver predictable data rate, predictable latency, reliability, service insertion, security, AI and RAN analytics, network slicing and more. These capabilities are needed to support a multitude of emerging applications such as AR/VR, Industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles, drones, Industry 4.0 initiatives, Smart Cities, Smart Ports. Other APIs will include exposure to edge orchestration and management, Edge monitoring (KPIs), and more.  These open APIs will be the foundation for service and instrumentation APIs when integrating with public cloud development environments and will be defined as part of the implementation. Even though these APIs will be common across all Telco operators, the differentiation will be based on services provided through those APIs. 

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Attributes

Description

Informational

Type

New


Industry Sector

Cloud, Telco


Business driver

Public Cloud Service Providers are deploying Edge instances to better serve their end-users and applications, A multitude of these applications require close inter-working with Telco Edge deployments to provide predictable latency & throughput, reliability and other telco-grade requirements. The purpose of this blueprint family is to specify a standard set of APIs to expose towards Public Cloud Service Provider instances at the Edge.


Business use cases

Telco Edge deployments can provide APIs to support capabilities such as the following

  • UPF shunting capability -- routing the traffic to desired applications and network functions
  • Local breakout – video traffic offiloadoffload
  • Wireless air-port status
  • Location service -- the location of a specific UE, or identification of UEs within a geographical area
  • QoS acceleration – provide low latency, high throughput for OTT applications
  • Slicing scheduling management -- offering dedicated resources specifically tailored for application needs
  • Authentication – provided as service enablement (e.g., two-factor authentication) used by most OTT service providers 
  • Security – provided as service enablement (e.g., firewall service insertion)


Business Cost - Initial Build Cost Target Objective

The API platform (Gateway, SDK) will be deployed as cloud native containerized technology using Kubernetes.


Business Cost – Target Operational Objective

The APIs will be exposed and published to external public cloud service providers and application developers in a secure, controllable, traceable, scalable, and measurable way.


Security need

Northbound API platform (Gateway) will provide AAA, ACL, Policy enforcement functions. Southbound APIs that are used to call the core network functions of Telco will follow all the security requirements of 5G/4G core. 


Regulations

N/A


Other restrictions

N/A


Additional details

N/A


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Case Attributes

Description

Informational

Type

New


Blueprint Family - Proposed Name

Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI)


Use Case

Telco Edge deployments can provide APIs to support capabilities such as the following

  • UPF shunting capability -- routing the traffic to desired applications and network functions
  • Local breakout – video traffic offiloadoffload
  • Wireless air-port status
  • Location service -- location of a specific UE, or identification of UEs within a geographical area
  • QoS acceleration – provide low latency, high throughput for OTT applications
  • Slicing scheduling management -- offering dedicated resources specifically tailored for application needs
  • Authentication – provided as service enablement (e.g., two-factor authentication) used by most OTT service providers 
  • Security – provided as service enablement (e.g., firewall service insertion)


Blueprint proposed 

Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI)


Initial POD Cost (capex)

1 x86/Arm server, 4G/5G radio, switch


Scale & Type

x86/Arm servers + FPGA acceleration


Applications

Value-added capabilities of operators to open up, e.g.

  • Portability
  • Location capabilities
  • Wireless network information capabilities

Different applications will trigger different APIs.


Power Restrictions

N/A


Infrastructure orchestration

OS : Ubuntu 16.x, Centos7

VM: Airship, ONAP

Containers: K8s


SDN

OVS-DPDK, SR-IOV


Workload Type

VMs, Containers


Additional Details

Need 4G/5G radio environment for POD


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As per the Akraino Community process and directed by TSC, a blueprint which that has only one nominee for Project Technical Lead (PTL) will be the elected lead once at least one committer seconds the nomination after the close of nominations.  If there are two or more, an election will take place.

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