Cisco, the U.S. IT and networking giant, is partnering with Reliance Jio, the largest network provider in India, to build a mobile CDN in Brazil. Cisco recently announced the partnership in a joint press statement. The two companies are developing a use case mobile content delivery network (CDN) to optimize and enhance video experience over Reliance Jio’s Cisco-powered, IP network. The joint network has rapidly grown in size over the last year, and the companies expect it to “see tremendous growth over the next several months”.
The statement cites a Cisco study anticipating video to comprise 82% of all IP network traffic by 2021. In order to address the rapid growth in the use of the Internet for video, mobile operators are devising new techniques to scale their networks to handle the surge in video traffic, and work out ways to be profitable around video. Cisco and Reliance Jio are doing this by integrating the CDN into the mobile LTE network with edge caches in order to gain close proximity to mobile users. Through a mobile CDN, the mobile operator can deliver content via edge cloudlets, which delivers higher performance and lower latency for the user.
“Reliance Jio and Cisco continue to drive advancements in technology and create unique best practices for service aware networking, and this joint collaboration on edge computing is another example of our effort to constantly reinvent the network and the services”, said Mathew Oommen, president, Reliance Jio.
Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president, general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco said, “With this multi-access edge computing demo, we are showcasing the possibilities enabled by edge computing to deliver premium-quality mobile entertainment experiences to RJIO customers.”
For its prototype mobile CDN, Cisco and Reliance Jio used a mixture of IP address management techniques based on the mobile core, demanding tight integration between edge cache, mid-tier cache, and the traffic router in the Cisco Open Media Distribution system. One system level solution was created by combining the mobile core and Cisco’s Open Media Distribution system.
To address the challenge of user plane selection, they adopted a technique called Control/User Plane Separation (CUPS). The companies also resolved the issue of assigning a geographically appropriate IP address to the mobile device. They also addressed that of handover resiliency in the face of IP address changes on the client side and the CDN cache site without alteration or disturbance to current services.
The companies demoed the concept at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month.