Reliance Jio and Cisco today announced that they would be developing a new mobile content delivery network (CDN) to improve the video watching user experience in smartphones. A report recently said that video would comprise 82% of all IP network traffic by 2021, as more are watching on multiple screens. And this turned into a challenge for mobile operators on how to scale the network to handle all this video traffic and how to manage a profitable video around video. To address the changing dynamics of network traffic, Reliance Jio and Cisco’s strategic relationship scales across multiple domains and technology areas.
Over the past year, Reliance Jio’s Cisco-powered, the all-IP network has grown significantly in size, and with new growth is further expected to see tremendous growth over the next several months. "Cisco and Reliance Jio are now working together to leverage the power of multi-access edge computing, beginning with a use case to further optimise and enhance video experience over the network by developing a mobile content delivery network (CDN)," said a media statement from Jio.
In this concept, the CDN is integrated into the mobile LTE network with edge caches in close proximity to the mobile users. With a mobile CDN, the mobile operator can deliver content via edge cloudlets to provide a better user experience with lower latency and higher performance.
Mobile Video Delivery From the Edge
And the companies have already come up with a prototype. For the prototype, the companies used a combination of IP address management techniques based on the mobile core, requiring tight integration between edge cache, mid-tier cache, and the traffic router in the Cisco Open Media Distribution system. The mobile core and the Cisco Open Media Distribution were combined into one system level solution for the CDN embedded in the mobile network.
To solve the problem of user plane selection, they used a technique called Control/User Plane Separation (CUPS) as defined in 3GPP R14 (Third-Generation Partnership Project R14 standards release). Cisco and Reliance Jio also solved the issue of assigning a geographically appropriate IP address to the mobile device and the issue of handover resiliency in the face of IP address changes on the client side and the CDN cache site without change or disturbance to the current services.
“Reliance Jio is always about innovation and disruption, and multi-access edge computing enables a new way to deliver a broad range of media and mission-critical services with enhanced customer experience with improved network efficiency,” said Mathew Oommen, president, Reliance Jio. “Reliance Jio and Cisco continue to drive advancements in technology and create unique best practices for service-aware networking, and this collaboration on edge computing is another example of our effort to constantly reinvent the network and the services,” he added.
Reliance Jio and Cisco are demonstrating the new concept at Mobile World Congress.
