China Unicom and Baicells Develop New Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Virtual Reality (VR) Solutions for 5G Using Artesyn MaxCore™ Platform

China Unicom and Baicells joint research and development solution fuses together a number of today’s most advanced technologies, including a panoramic video collage algorithm, a panoramic video transmission protocol, a MEC architecture, and an LTE/5G data channel quality of service (QoS) guarantee mechanism.

The panoramic video collage algorithm and transmission protocol ensures the panoramic VR video is seamless, while the MEC architecture brings the processing technology closer to the user for low latency and – combined with LTE/5G transmission – ensures a fluent, interference-free, high-speed transmission of the video data. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone in the demonstration features 360 degree panoramic high-definition cameras. The user can enter the panoramic video and manipulate it to achieve an unprecedented immersive live VR experience. Enabling the low transmission latency and seamless panoramic live HD VR broadcast is an MEC architecture gateway powered by the Artesyn MaxCore™ acceleration platform, a specialized hardware and software platform optimized for mobile edge computing.

“This end-to-end solution can be applied not only to concerts, sporting events, films and other entertainment industries, such as the Mid-Autumn festival, live CCTV broadcasts using VR panoramic technology, but it can also be applied to public safety, emergency communication, UAV inspection, and much more,” said Mingyu Zhou, Baicells’ research director. “We believe China Unicom and Baicells’ joint research and development can help users experience live HD VR video transmissions more quickly and smoothly.”

“MEC provides a distributed computing environment for application and service hosting, bringing cloud technologies closer to the radio access network (RAN) and ultimately, closer to consumers. Carriers are telling us that for these applications they need telco-grade features, which is Artesyn’s expertise,” said Linsey Miller, marketing vice president, Artesyn Embedded Technologies. “This demonstration shows that our MaxCore platform is the perfect hardware for high density MEC compute and acceleration, providing computing resources, storage capacity, low-latency connectivity and access to RAN information.”