Through understanding the application scenarios in the industry, it is not difficult to find that after end devices are endowed with edge computing capability, their business and computing processes gradually tend to be complicated, and the communication and collaboration processes are gradually cumbersome. Therefore, a reliable edge computing gateway platform is needed to further coordinate and manage its own business as well as the terminal devices under it, and further manage and control its own computing and storage capacity.
Therefore, the edge computing gateway platform has the following characteristics.
1. Core Service Persistence
The core services of the edge computing gateway platform should be persisted on the storage space and start automatically when the gateway is powered on. Considering that the gateway is still an end device of the operator, its necessary network services, tunneling services, voice services, wireless services and other services should receive control from the operator, and these services should not change with the user’s application changes.
2. Platform Architecture Microservices
Edge computing gateway platform subsystems, plug-ins, applications, etc. are divided into service granularity, and the micro-services formed by the division are strictly decoupled by service, and the services, as well as third-party cloud applications, are allowed to interact with each other only through the open API, and are not permitted to directly share data or interact with each other through the private API; and the services can be independently developed, independently released and independently upgraded; The services are visible, manageable, controllable, measurable, maintainable and self-healing.
3. Universal Application Containerisation
Edge computing gateway involves a large number of applications, different applications require very different resources and environments. With the hot cloud native, unified scheduling, orchestration and management gradually become a must. Good container scheduling and management capabilities often directly determine the soft power of the gateway edge platform. However, it should be noted that the core services should not be containerised.
4. Lightweight Communication Services
Edge computing gateway platforms need to communicate with the cloud constantly because they are on the end side, and heavy communication services tend to aggravate the computational burden of the end-side devices, while taking up more resources. Therefore, having lightweight communication protocols not only enables the edge computing gateway platform to quickly communicate with the cloud platform for reliable cloud collaboration, but also allows flexible handling of communication data with the cloud platform.
5. Intelligent Personalised Applications
The applications running on the edge computing gateway platform should be as intelligent as possible. On the one hand, further use of the edge computing power of the gateway edge can avoid unnecessary waste of computing resources; at the same time, providing intelligent applications for the terminals or end users under the gateway can greatly facilitate the operation of the user, and bring a good experience for the user or device.
6. Disconnected Data Timing
When the edge computing gateway is in the state of disconnection or weak network, in order to ensure that the user’s data is not lost or to ensure that the service is available as much as possible, the data at this time should be time-sequenced. When the gateway recovers the network connection, the data will be further interacted according to the time sequence, thus effectively avoiding the loss of data retransmission and ensuring the availability of services.
7. Flexible Resource Invocation
Since the computing and storage resources on the edge computing gateway are still limited compared to the server, its computing or storage resources should have the characteristics of elasticity, scalability and flexible use. Thus, the use of resources on the dispositivo gateway can be maximised.
With the gradual emergence of 5G and WIFI6 technology, more and more gateway devices join 5G and WIFI6. 5G can ensure that the edge gateway has high bandwidth and low latency, and with the continuous improvement of the 5G standard, with the 5G slice of the edge gateway will be in the field of edge computing to make a big difference; and WIFI6 provides a good wireless environment on the user side, which makes the high-definition video, game acceleration, AR/VR gradually rise in the user side, more and more users will embrace these applications, and edge computing gateway platform combined with its own hardware computing power, will provide users with rich applications while providing a good user experience; in addition, because the gateway itself has a special attribute of PON uplink, which makes the edge computing gateway platform to add bricks and mortar to the SD-WAN field.