With the advent of 5G, will edge data centers become popular?

The epidemic has interrupted the construction progress of many industries, including new infrastructure such as 5G and data centers. Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the three major operators have stated that the 5G construction goals for 2020 will remain unchanged, dispelling everyone's concerns.

In this epidemic prevention and control, many 5G applications have stood out and played an important role, such as the 5G "cloud supervision" of Leishenshan, 5G infrared thermal imaging temperature measurement, and 5G remote diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. It can be foreseen that with the advancement of 5G construction this year, 5G will also usher in more innovative applications in the fields of finance, medical care, transportation, manufacturing, etc.

Judging from the current 5G application scenarios, it not only requires very low and deterministic network latency, but also requires massive, heterogeneous and diverse data access. For the existing traditional cloud computing processing model, 5G applications have brought bottlenecks and challenges.

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If the network is likened to a water supply network, data is water flow, and traditional cloud data centers are water plants or reservoirs. The water supply system they form can meet the original residents' low-pressure and small-flow water needs. The popularization of 5G is like adding a large number of super-high-rise building users. Not only will the water consumption increase dramatically, but the water pressure will also need to increase. The traditional water supply system cannot meet these needs, and cloud data centers are "distant water cannot quench the thirst of the immediate."

With the construction and popularization of 5G, many industrial applications will generate massive amounts of data. The large bandwidth and low latency of 5G can only solve the problem of data transmission, while the processing requirements of these data will pose a huge challenge to existing cloud data centers. How big is it? In 2020, there will be more than 50 billion terminals and devices connected to the Internet, more than half of the IoT networks will face network bandwidth limitations, and 40% of the data will need to be analyzed, processed and stored at the edge of the network.

In addition to the demand for large bandwidth, different industrial application scenarios in the 5G era also put forward different demand focuses:

Low latency

5G application in medical treatment - 5G remote surgery requires extremely low latency to ensure the accuracy of doctors' operations. In the world's first multi-center 5G remote surgery with orthopedic surgery robots at Beijing Jishuitan Hospital in June 2019, the end-to-end latency was 20 milliseconds. Low latency is also vital in 5G+ autonomous driving. The response speed of autonomous vehicles needs to be reduced to milliseconds to handle emergencies on the road in a timely manner.

High Interaction

The main functions of traditional security are video surveillance and manual review. In the 5G era, intelligent security will develop into holographic perception and data intelligence. In scenarios such as important security, urban comprehensive management, and ports, it is necessary to monitor the density and number of people, and to cooperate with facial recognition to track the behavior of suspicious persons, etc., which requires high interactivity.

Data autonomy

Some enterprises and parks require that data storage and processing be local for data security and privacy reasons. This was the case in a 5G smart park pilot in Kunshan, Suzhou in September 2019. The park required that "local data should not leave the park" in the application of 5G+ smart workshops to ensure the security of enterprise data.

To meet these demands, deploying server nodes at the edge of the network to provide efficient and intelligent computing, storage and network resources nearby has become the most effective solution. According to market research institutions, the edge computing market size will exceed one trillion yuan, becoming an emerging market that shares the same status with cloud computing.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that with the popularization of 5G, there will be a huge demand for edge data centers, and edge data centers will become popular.

Unlike the current centralized cloud data centers, edge computing centers will be small, distributed, and close to users because they are responsible for real-time business decisions and short-term storage of large amounts of personal privacy data. In the 5G era, the user end will form an extremely tight cloud-edge-end architecture with cloud data centers and edge data centers.