Cisco, Huawei Among Alef Mobitech Edge Platform Test Partners

Alef Mobitech recently completed interoperability testing of its Edge Computing Platform with a handful of vendors and one “Tier-1 global mobile carrier.” Company CEO Ganesh Sundaram said the test partners included Cisco, Huawei, Nokia, Dell, HP, and Ericsson. The Tier 1 mobile operator is presumably based in India as Sundaram said the tests were done in a lab and on a live network in that country. Components of the test included standard billing interfaces, interconnection with existing operations, administration, and maintenance. The tests were complete enough for Alef Mobitech to gain several local government approvals, including for lawful intercept. It was also able to certify HP and Dell computing platforms and “other virtual machine configurations” for its platform. The Alef Mobitech platform is software-based and is compliant with 3GPP standards to work with relevant network standards. Sundaram explained that the “platform and solution stacks focus on mobility network functions needed to interconnect any edge application without any upgrades to underlying network or origin cloud.” Architecturally, the platform can sit anywhere between the eNodeB and the serving gateway (S-Gateway). The eNodeB is hardware that manages connectivity within an LTE network. The S-Gateway acts as a router and forwards data between the base station and the packet data network gateway (P-Gateway). Physically, the platform is deployed at the edge where it interfaces with the central cloud. It also requires either existing virtual machine (VM) computing capabilities or standard 1U servers.