MEC pioneer recognized as ‘Best MEC use case’ for PoC partnership with Argela, and for ‘Biggest contribution to R&D’
23rd September 2016, Camberley, UK – Quortus today announced that it has been named a double winner at the Edge Awards, part of the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Congress. The company was honored in both the ‘Best MEC Use Case’ category for its ground-breaking Proof of Concept (PoC) ‘Healthcare – Dynamic Hospital User, IoT and Alert Status Management’, developed with partner Argela, and for ‘Biggest contribution to R&D’ for its innovative work in developing its EdgeCentrix disaggregated cellular core network solutions.
The Healthcare PoC leverages Quortus’ long experience in deploying edge-of-network architectures and its innovative approach to MEC, alongside advanced technologies from Argela, including its ProgRAN SDN-based RAN slicing solution. The PoC demonstrates a number of advanced technologies, including 5G-aligned network slicing and control/user plane separation (CUPS) to show how highly differentiated services can be defined and deployed.
“The entire PoC 6 team is delighted to be recognized with this prestigious award,” said Oguz Sunay, CTO, Argela USA. “Quortus and Argela have clearly demonstrated the real-world application and relevance of MEC, not just in healthcare, but in any community of interest.”
The PoC demonstrates how a hospital could be empowered to assign a cellular access hierarchy to local systems depending on managed access rights. Users – and IoT devices – can be prioritized depending on hospital ‘alert’ status, with dynamic hospital-managed upgrading of users between categories, and dynamic response to critical incidents with modifications to radio resource allocations.
The 5G slicing technology, jointly developed by Argela and Quortus, enables the virtual partitioning of both the radio access network (RAN) and the core network (CN) components of the cellular network as well as orchestration of end-to-end slicing. The RAN slicing technology in the PoC is Argela’s ProgRAN architecture, which decouples the data and control planes in the RAN, and allows operators to dynamically create, modify or terminate virtual base stations on existing base station hardware.
Quortus’ award for contribution to R&D was based upon work undertaken to align the company’s marketing-leading EdgeCentrix core network solutions with MEC and 5G architectures. The work leverages software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and CUPS, and incorporates forward-looking technologies within the MEC paradigm, to improve service delivery. The Quortus disaggregated core architecture, itself aligned with 5G, SDN, NVF and ETSI MEC principles, has already been incorporated in a deployment-ready MEC project alongside partners ACS and Stratacache.
“MEC is a powerful concept; and we are now in the critical process of defining how it can best be put to work and what the next steps in its evolution will be,” said Andy Odgers, Quortus CEO. “The work undertaken to MEC-align our award-winning EdgeCentrix solutions ensures that a backbone of tools will be available for Quortus and other organizations to continue the development of the technology going forward.”
