The EBU is leading a 21-company consortium developing online delivery combining distributed edges connected via a satellite backhaul, which “improves playout quality and should reduce traffic costs by ingesting content as close as possible to the end user”, said Bram Tullemans, Senior Project Manager, EBU. “The project is called 5G-Emerge as it uses 5G technologies to achieve convergence.”
This is transparent to the audience as their media applications are redirected to local caches on the far edge. “These distributed edges could be deployed near 5G base stations, for example, or in local routers in homes or cars, or at a 5G base station on a ship,” he explained.
For content providers, the ecosystem functions as a normal (multi-) CDN setup. Satellite networks deliver multicast streams of popular content, jumping over busy interconnection points. Content to fill this feed is retrieved from reverse proxy requests in which content can be prioritised by a prefetching engine that predicts content likely to be popular in the region covered by the satellite network.
The new approach is said to improve playout quality, with low latency and fast start-up times. It also works at locations with limited or no IP coverage as it can fall back to satellite-only mode. Network functions can be exposed all the way up to the 5G devices. Where there is no 5G network available, the far edge will be the end point. The 5G-Emerge ecosystem is compliant with a futureproof 5G-architecture approach and can provide a fallback for existing non-5G components.
Stand Number: 10.D21
Company: www.5g-emerge.com / https://tech.ebu.ch EBU (European Broadcasting Union)
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