By David K. Bainbridge, Stephane Barbarie, Dmitri Fedorov, Marco Naveda & Raghu Ranganathan, Ciena Corporation
Communications networks are at the heart of advancing society and bringing people and places closer together. The evolution of communications services will be central in transforming how we work, play, collaborate, and interact with the environment around us. Emerging collaboration technologies such as augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) promise to offer highly immersive, multi-user, real-time and content rich experiences that will simplify business operations, improve productivity, and unlock new services and revenue sources across a wide range of verticals. This type of application relies on large amounts of bandwidth and extremely low network delay to do real-time processing of very large data sets and tracking user and virtual object movement, while enabling fine-grained interactions between remote users, the physical world, and holographic objects. This will be possible as network application intelligence and cloud platforms converge at the network edge in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) locations.