Virtual Edge-Based Smart Community Network Management

Providing multitenant, multiaccess, and multiservice solutions in communities is key to sustaining innovations and economic development. This article investigates a solution for rearchitecting a telecommunications company's (telco's) central office to offer services in a smart community, enabled by virtual network function elements running on a smart edge. These elements manage a multiaccess underlying infrastructure and deploy telco services with minimal resource consumption. The virtual smart edge flexibly routes traffic, aggregates, and splits flows across a heterogeneous network to achieve network operational efficiency, and optimizes computing resource allocation for last-mile Internet of Things services hosted close to the end user.