Samsung Electronics announces that Walter Featherstone, a Staff Engineer within Samsung Research, has been appointed as Vice Chair of the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group (ISG) within ETSI following online elections. His position as Chair for the ISG’s Deployment and Ecosystem Development (DECODE) Working Group was reaffirmed earlier in the year.

ETSI ISG MEC was established late 2014 and has been at the heart of edge computing related standardization efforts ever since. A key driver throughout this period has been to specify and then evolve a framework that offers an IT service environment at the edge of the network. This environment is characterized by the ability to offer services to end users that demand high bandwidth and low latency. This is achieved through the deployment of such services in close proximity to the subscribers of the underlying network. The service environment has been created in a way that it can be opened up to third party application developers and providers through a common set of standardized APIs, enabling a wealth of innovative services to be offered and new use cases to be addressed.

Since the establishment of the group, interest in edge computing has continued to flourish across the wider ecosystem, with Samsung also making significant contributions to the edge computing related activities in 3GPP. In particular, rapporteurship for the development of the architecture for enabling edge applications (EDGEAPP) that consolidates such work in 3GPP networks. The architecture is specified in 3GPP TS 23.558 and falls under the responsibility of 3GPP SA6. Samsung’s leadership positions at both ETSI ISG MEC and 3GPP SA6 are seen as critical in helping facilitate the ongoing harmonization efforts across these standards development organizations (SDOs) and industry organizations such as the GSMA. There has already been an initial ETSI white paper highlighting identified synergies.

Moving forward, a key focus for the ISG is expected to be continued collaboration with GSMA’s Operator Platform Group (OPG). In this regard, fulfilling the OPG’s identified requirements to federate edge computing infrastructure across multiple operators’ networks is a key objective. Such a federation would allow access to edge computing based services on a global scale, enabling application providers to offer innovative, distributed and low latency services wherever the end users are located. Once again, coordination with the activities in 3GPP will be vital to ensure efforts are not duplicated, or in conflict with one another. Here Samsung is expected to provide a pivotal role as this inter-system, edge computing focused, connected architecture continues to develop.