India’s Reliance JIO and Cisco are continuing to collaborate on solutions to deal with the growth in video traffic in mobile networks.
Cisco notes that video will comprise 82% of all IP network traffic by 20211, as more people are watching on multiple screens. This presents unique challenges for mobile operators, including how to scale their networks to handle all this video traffic and how to manage a profitable business around video.
To address the changing dynamics of network traffic, Reliance Jio and Cisco's strategic relationship has scaled across multiple domains and technology areas. Over the past year, Reliance Jio's Cisco-powered, 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). 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.
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.
