Written By: Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech
As we know that edge computing for businesses is revolutionary as it increases the speed of data processing and analysis. As per reports, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to grow significantly, predicted to reach about 1.6 trillion USD by 2025. Edge computing enables enterprises to process data at the location where it is being generated, which leads to reduction in latency.
The benefit of edge computing over cloud computing is the pace at which data is processed and analyzed. However, just like every other technology, edge computing is evolving too and new trends keep cropping up. One such trend is Mobile Edge Computing (MEC).
What is Mobile Edge Computing?
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), also known as multi-access edge computing, is like the outermost edge. MEC is one step ahead of edge computing as it takes the storage and computation at the outermost edge of the network, where wireless edge intersects the infrastructure edge. Simply put, where mobile network meets the internet and its users.
By placing infrastructure edge next to mobile networks, service providers can drive substantial improvements in performance and latency.
Now let us see how this new entrant in edge computing is transforming different industries:
- Media and Entertainment – Mobile edge computing has the potential to transform how media and entertainment industry operates, manages internal workflows and delivers core services. MEC offers the scalability and cost efficiency that this industry needs to extract maximum value and performance out of their business format. Since the core of this industry is content creation, processing, and distribution in real-time to enhance customer experience, it needs the right infrastructure that facilitates instant content sharing, processing, and distributing. For instance, if an art director wants to collaborate with a director or a team of editors and assistants spread across geographies, MEC can accelerate the delivery of information across the team and equip them with the computing resources they need to create more efficient digital experiences.
In this digital age, consumers do not have the patience to wait while their content is being delivered. When website pages or online videos take up time to load or play, the user experience gets hampered. MEC allows media and entertainment companies to deliver content and digital experiences more quickly and with lower latency. This improves performance and enhances user experience.
- Telecommunications – With the proliferation of IoT and 5G, MEC is all set to become the ‘go to technology’ for businesses. By implementing mobile edge computing infrastructures, telecom companies can leverage many of the computing resources they already possess while delivering faster service with reduced latency. MEC framework allows these companies to keep data near the edge of the network and closer to end users, thereby reducing strain on the bandwidth. This facilitates delivery of innovative mobile edge computing applications and services without compromising performance.
- Autonomous Vehicles – With the amount of research and advancements in sophisticated technologies such as AI, IoT and 5G, autonomous vehicles are expected to become more widespread. This industry is an apt use-case for MEC as it enables transmission and analysis of data in real-time, thereby providing autonomous vehicles real-time data to anticipate risk and act accordingly.
Mobile edge computing is fundamentally about extending the edge. It pushes technology resources and compute power even closer to the end users. Instead of sending data to an often distant data center for processing, MEC moves cloud computing resources closer to where data is actually being generated—the resulting applications can transform products and experiences in ways that were beyond imagination.
