NEWS Mobile devices are ubiquitous in our lives. That means the cloud must be too. How willtelecommunications companies adapt in order to support our networked society?
We live in an interconnected, data-rich world. In a society with a mobile phone in every pocket, and tablets in the hands of everyone from engineers and commuters to school kids and cashiers, we all want data, and we all want it now.
But our current data delivery system is not sufficient for this new networked world. Telecommunications companies have to find ways to rethink the current system, in which our data are delivered by large data centers that send packets of digital information to our mobile devices from centralized locations. These concentrated clearinghouses cannot manage the ever-growing demands for data efficiently, without affecting the performance of mobile devices.
And hence, the Telco Cloud: data needs to be stored and delivered in a decentralized system, pulled down readily from the cloud, but also from smaller regional data centers or even hub sites or base stations inside the mobile network, i.e., closer to end-users, in order to make its delivery and the use of devices on the telecommunications network smooth and seamless. Even calculations made by applications that use that data must be distributed. But getting all those dispersed elements to interact well will require a lot of work — exactly how can large data centers interact with mobile phones, their base stations, and everything in between? Johan Tordsson, associate professor of the distributed systems research group of Umeå University, and his colleagues in academia and industry want to find answers. They are working on the problems of the Telco Cloud starting out with statistical models that they can then test in reallife, to get insights into the most efficient configurations and resource management applications.
The full article is available in the UMIT annual report.
Editor: Mats Johansson