Deutsche Telekom contributes to edge computing testbed at Carnegie Mellon University

Deutsche Telekom, in collaboration with infrastructure partner Crown Castle, and vRAN solution vendor Altiostar, is building an ultra-low latency mobile testbed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh as part of the Open Edge Computing Initiative.

“The Living Edge Lab testbed is a major technology milestone towards use-case centric Edge Computing and will provide application developers with an early experience of the benefits of 5G technology,” says Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Research and Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. “It is a unique Edge Computing platform that leverages a fully virtualized end-to-end solution and the  implementation of user-tracing beamforming antennas for the first time in a live environment.”

DT said the Edge Computing setup combines a fully software-enable network with a modular Radio Access Network (RAN) platform. The wireless access in the 3.5GHz band leverages advanced LTE and 5G features such as Massive MIMO, Active Antenna Systems (AAS), and beamforming technology by Airrays, a German radio vendor, and is powered by vRAN (virtual RAN) technology by Altiostar.

The vRAN solution uses an innovative method to connect the AAS panels with the virtualized baseband unit (vBBU), a performance-optimized NFV platform running on Commercial off the Shelf (CoTS) hardware inside the CMU campus alongside the Edge Computing server “Cloudlet”. Connectivity to each site leverages extensive fiber optic networks owned and maintained by Crown Castle.

http://openedgecomputing.org