IEC Type 4 is an Akraino approved blueprint and part of Akraino Edge Stack. The project is focused on AR VR applications running on edge.

In general, the architecture consists of three layers:  Iaas(IEC), PaaS(Tars), SaaS(AR/VR Application).

Use Cases

In general, there are multiple use cases for AR VR itemized below.  For Release 2, we focus on building the infrastructure and virtual classroom application (Highlighted in dark purple color).

Virtual Classroom is a basic app that allows you to live a virtual reality experience simulating a classroom with teachers and students.

After successfully deploy the virtual classroom application, the following virtual classroom is waiting for you. Enjoy!

Overall Architecture

The whole architecture, shown below, consists of two parts: the front end and the backend.

• For the front end, the minimal requirements are two clients, one for the teacher and the other one for the student. The client device could be a cellphone, tablets, wearable devices，personal computers, etc.  The client collects information from the real world and transfers the data to the backend for calculation. Beyond data transfer and calculation, render is another function running on the front end client-side.
• For the backend, we deploy the backend in two virtual machines in the Cloud.  
  1. To make the VR backend work well, we deploy IEC in the IaaS Layer, Tars framework in PaaS Layer, Virtual Classroom Backend in SaaS Layer.
  2. To make CI/CD available, we deploy Jenkins Master in one Virtual Machine.  The Jenkins master issues command to triger the script run on the dedicated VM.   

For more information about Tars, refer to the following documents:

TARS_Introduction_20191205 (1).pdf

For more information about IEC, refer to the following documents:

IEC Release 2 Documentation

To address the requirements of time-critical Application, some optimizations are itemized below:

• High Perform RPC Call:   Tars Framework supports Tars Protocol.  In terms of the details of Tars Protocol, pls refer to https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1381515

• Lightweight framework: 
  1. To make Tars can be well deployed on the edge computing platform, we make the framework pluggable. The customer plugin the pluggable components when we really need it. Unnecessary components can be avoided.
  2. Rewrite some functions(like scale-out, monitor and so on) to reduce CPU consumption. 
  3. Orchestrate no-urgent functions(like monitor data calculation and so on) from edge to DC(or higher level edge). Reduce resource consumption. 
• The integration of IEC and Tars 

Main Progresses for Release 2

Release 2 is the first release for IEC Type 4. So everything is new.

Build Of Materials (BOM) / Hardware requirements

For R2, we deploy IEC in Tencent Cloud for Release.  The detailed hardware is itemized below: