Italtel, a leading telecommunications company in IT system integration, managed services and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, has revealed its latest 5G video application, delivering improved upload performances, reducing latency and increasing the battery life of connected devices.
Italtel’s i-EVS (Enhanced Video Services) – the latest advancement of its virtual Transcoding Unit (vTU) application – runs over a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) platform and has been updated with new features, including context-aware and location-aware mechanisms, enabling service providers to launch new value-added services.
Due to specific data caching at the edge of the mobile network, end-users can enjoy fast access to dedicated content based on their position in busy environments such as shopping malls, airports and concerts.
“The MEC platform provides a virtualised layer which allows the high processing of content at the network edge and is a fundamental step towards the creation of an experimental network infrastructure that anticipates 5G,” said Giulio Gaetani, Head of Software Business Unit at Italtel. “The application highlights the crucial role of the Network Functions Virtualization paradigm in managing parameters of the new 5G network architecture.”
Mobile World Congress saw the first global demonstration of i-EVS following its initial testing within the Horizon 2020 5G ESSENCE project (Grant Agreement No. 761592). 5G ESSENCE addresses the paradigms of Edge Cloud computing and ‘Small Cell as a Service’, moving towards a highly flexible and scalable 5G-ready platform.
In particular, the i-EVS demo in Barcelona was being designed jointly with Athonet, a research and commercial partner of Italtel for mobile solutions. Italtel and Athonet have built a complete Mobile 4.5G LTE solution (ready to connect forthcoming 5G New Radio) that includes both an LTE RAN and a MEC platform, which hosts i-EVS. The goal is to simulate a real mobile environment and enable a set of services related to augmented reality.
The demonstration utilised Athonet’s MEC solution, which allows traffic to be broken-out selectively based on policy and steered locally to support both content caching and management and other applications that require low latency or local offload, including augmented reality/virtual reality, smart city, autonomous cars, etc.
“To create the richest service environment that simultaneously supports new services such as HD video and augmented reality, we are not just addressing the evolution of services, but the evolution of the network infrastructure which will support the high traffic posed by 5G,” said Gaetani.
