AAEON Partners with NTUST and Chunghwa Telecom to Develop 5G MEC Testing Facility

5G cellular communication is increasing in popularity, thanks to low latency, high bandwidth capacity and faster speeds, resulting in continuous growth in data traffic from content providers, video streaming and more. However, increased demand on 5G networks threatens to throttle these advantages as more and more smart IoT applications which depend on cellular communication come online. Recently, service providers have been looking to maintain quality of service by finding a way to route traffic so not all data has to go through the core network servers.

AAEON has partnered with NTUST and Chunghwa Telecom to build a testing and validation site focused on Smart Manufacturing applications which utilize 5G networks. The Smart Manufacturing Technology and Validation Site (5G SMT RVS) is built to test, validate and operate MEC servers, an important key to maintaining private 4G and 5G networks. MEC operates by retaining data for local applications and server tasks, reducing the amount of data transferred to central servers, and in turn reducing the reliance on the core network.

As a leading manufacturer of edge computing and network platforms, AAEON provided the hardware for the MEC server, in the form of the FWS-8600 edge computing server, powered by 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® SP processors. The FWS-8600 provides a level of expandability and flexibility, allowing for configurations which include GP and AI acceleration capabilities, and scalability to meet the demands of providing MEC services.

This joint project has produced a proof of concept utilizing a streaming video test. Streaming video and audio are sent to the terminal device from a surveillance camera, with various parameters adjusted to test MEC server performance, including stream resolution, framerate and number of connect users (by creating a series of “virtual users”). Test observers can measure any delay or drop in quality of the stream, as well as other factors. This allows for a number of important performance indicators to be identified which can optimize the MEC structure and 5G applications, helping improve hardware and software integration solutions.

AAEON is a leading manufacturer of network platforms. AAEON provides professional and diverse X86 hardware platform Netcom products for applications such as MEC Server, SD-WAN, SDN, NFV, Wireless Gateway, NGFW, Intrusion Detection/Prevention, WAN Optimization, Network Access Control, Load Balancing, Web Content Filtering, Unified Threat Management, and Wireless Network Security. For more information about AAEON network solutions, visit www.aaeon.com.