To describe the “Traffic Influence” API (TI API) we consider a reference scenario: It foresees a service, composed by one or more service producers deployed in different geographical locations in a distributed Telco Edge Cloud. The service producers, deployed at the Telco Edge Cloud, are referred as Edge Application Servers (EAS). The life cycle management of the EAS can be done with the CAMARA “Edge Application Management” API whose definition is in the
CAMARA Edge Cloud repository.
The Telco Edge Cloud is composed by Edge Cloud regions that contain Edge Cloud zones. For a more complete definition of such Telco Edge Cloud architecture, please refer to the “Edge Application Management” API documentation. A developer can deploy and run applications on an Edge Cloud zone, meaning reduced latency to end users that are nearby, as the network path is shorter. A network operator’s Edge Cloud may comprise multiple Edge Cloud zones, each in a discrete location to bring latency benefits to end users across a country.
The operator can help developers knowing which of the Edge Cloud zones will bring the optimal performance for a given end user and application. The TI API provides the optimal routing from the user device (e.g. a smartphone) to the optimal EAS instance in a specific geographical location, installed in an Edge Cloud zone.
If a service is offered by cloud instances and by Edge Cloud instances, the TI API can be used to get the optimal routing of the traffic to the Edge Cloud instances, maybe for a set of users. Getting the optimal routing can be used to improve latency maybe in combination with other CAMARA APIs such as “Quality On Demand”. Providing the optimal routing is indeed an important step to get the optimal latency.
If the TI API is used to get the best routing at the Edge Cloud for a device in a geographical location and the device moves to another geographical location, the TI API can be invoked to get the optimal routing in the new geographical location for that device.
While the goal of the TI API is to optimize the traffic in the mobile network to reach the local instance of the EAS, it is a task of the application to generate the flow toward the expected EAS instance.
