Why the edge matters?

Industrial 5G Forum was held virtually. In a panel discussion, from data to decisions, Andrew Keene, Senior Director of Product Management, Volt Active Data, presented the benefits of co-locating data and decisions at the edge.

There are multiple benefits of co-locating data and decisions. A real-time decisioning platform can be built to support the latency, scale, consistency, and cloud/edge processing demands of modern enterprise applications. Volt-powered applications make decisions on billions of mission-critical events every day.

Edge processing offers several benefits. Some of these are: ultra-low-latency decisions, reduce data transmission cost, reduce network congestion, and data privacy.

The network edge can be closest! It’s possible to make decisions to the device within the network, except for on the device itself. Cell towers could be in public locations, urban/rural, 5G-powered IoT factory floor, enterprise buildings/campuses, and public or private networks.

However, there are constraints. There may be limited space and capacity, more extreme environmental variations, and lots of varied/remote locations, costs to manage.

Sample edge relevant use cases include private network SLA, fraud prevention, customer experience, smart grid, traffic management, digital twin, supply chain, fleet management, etc.

There can be IoT data processing at the edge. Example, for smart cities, it can be via road traffic management. Fleet management and fraud prevention can be done using AI/ML. We can have tiered data platform for edge IoT running AI models. Tiered concentration is a very meaningful approach. Leaf tiers can satisfy the latency SLAs, and then use the higher levels for more visibility purposes. It helps to save a lot of data transmission and storage costs by filtering out useful data close to the source and at each level.

Volt Active Data enables organizations to power real-time business opportunities, and instantly derive value from anomalous events captured across multiple streams of fast data. Precise decisions, made in less than 10ms, can directly influence in-the-moment monetization, prevent digital fraud, and power digital transformation initiatives.