Vasona Networks, Inc^.®, which provides mobile edge solutions for better user experiences and network capital efficiency, announced a partnership effort with F5, which makes apps go faster, smarter and safer for the world’s service providers. The companies will work together to power virtual multi-access edge computing (MEC) deployments for mobile operators at scale.

The collaboration between Vasona Networks and F5 comes as operators globally are investing in intelligent edge capabilities to offer differentiated and agile low-latency services on the path to 5G.

F5’s advanced load balancing and load sharing redundancy combined with Vasona’s SmartAIR Virtual Edge Services Platform (vESP) in-line traffic monitoring and management can be deployed quickly to deliver health monitoring and high-availability across applications and MEC platform functions. This is especially important in emerging industries such as industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles and smart cities, where redundancy and uninterrupted service is critical to ongoing operation.

“5G is just around the corner and MEC represents the start of a new era of evolved technology implementations from the RAN to the network edge to the cloud,” said Damir Vrankic, senior director of product management at F5. “We are pleased to be partnering with Vasona as we look to enable these exciting new opportunities.”

The interoperable solution is commercially available in Vasona’s latest software release, SmartAIR version 3.0.

Other key features include:

1. Edge Breakout for powering the next wave of mobile innovation of blazing fast services with low latency, even in the face of mounting demand and network congestion. First announced before Mobile World Congress 2018, Edge Breakout exposes Vasona’s real-time cell insight and traffic management capabilities to allow third-party applications to “break out” the traffic from its path near the edge and deliver it to apps in a secure, local edge cloud.
2. A zero-touch update to SmartTUNING senses conditions in the network on individual cells and automatically triggers traffic management and video shaping templates. The network automatically adapts and adjusts to user demand to provide the best experiences.
3. Enhanced SmartVISION for reporting and exporting new RAN KPIs provides browsing, video and social media app session size/count/duration/rates/latency for every cell sector-carrier, cross-referenced to cell utilisation and count of consuming users in the cell. This provides the ability to identify under-performing cells that affect user experiences.

“There is enormous opportunity at the edge for mobile operators to offer new low-latency services,” said John Reister, senior vice president of marketing and product for Vasona Networks. “Vasona’s MEC software platform delivers increased capital efficiency and network agility to support new business cases. Our work with F5 extends these capabilities to virtualised networks, where we can ensure uninterrupted services for a range of new industries.”

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