Is Edge Computing Going to Dovetail With Wi-Fi Offload?

“AI is very good at consuming large amounts of data,” especially at the edge of the network, says Jim Thompson, Qualcomm CTO said. And that is one reason the value of 5G will in many instances be a combination of ultra-low-latency access, plus edge computing, plus applications using artificial intelligence that must process lots of data very quickly, nearly in real time. 

In the 5G era there might be many cases where edge computing is not strictly necessary to support latency requirements, but might add value as a way of reducing wide area network transport costs, preserving privacy or boosting security. 

The edge cloud might reduce network transport costs and load by conducting some processing at the edge, without transiting over the wide area network. 

Qualcomm believes there’s a “partition between the cloud, the edge, and then this very close edge cloud that is milliseconds away from the device,” Thompson said.

AI might therefore be one of those developments--other than the numbers of smartphone accounts, the amount of data consumed by smartphone users--that shapes network demand. 

And that, in turn, might shape use of Wi-Fi and mobile networks. 

Some have speculated that Wi-Fi offload will be less relevant after 5G networks are in place, especially in markets where unlimited usage or big buckets of usage are the norm. 

But researchers at Cisco believe the huge amounts of data 5G will enable (faster networks have always lead to higher data consumption in any unit of time), combined with usage-based data allowances, will still create value for offloading device data consumption to Wi-Fi.

Perhaps the same might be said of how edge computing winds up being used. Applications will offload to edge computing facilities as a way of reducing the cost of processing huge amounts of data in near-real time or real time. 

The amount of traffic offloaded from 4G was 57 percent at the end of 2017, and it will be 59 percent by 2022, Cisco predicts. 

The offload percentage on 5G might be as high as 71 percent by 2022. One might speculate that offload to local computing also will be part of this trend, especially if edge computing happens on the premises, on the campus or within the metro area. 

Figure 17.    Mobile Data Traffic and Offload Traffic, 2022

Note: Offload pertains to traffic from dual-mode devices (excluding laptops) over Wi-Fi or small-cell networks.

source: Cisco