Dell Technologies is leading Task 4.5, named Cloud to edge Control Plane. This task aims to reduce operational costs by focusing on the control plane to provide a solution for LifeChamps’s EDGE premises sensing platform components. The Cloud to edge Control Plane define the control plane of the Lifechamps platform to the EDGE devices, deployed at the edge of the network (e.g. patients’ homes) vs T3.4 (Data Ingestion, Aggregation and Streams Processing) – which is defined as the data path from devices located at the EDGE of the network to the platform. Thus, providing Control Plane/User Plane Data Separation (CUPS) architecture to the network’s EDGE.
The distinction has proven helpful in the networking field where it originated, as it separates the concerns: the data plane is optimised for speed of processing, simplicity, and regularity. The control plane is optimised for customizability, handling policies, update the EDGE devices operating system and software packages installed, handling exceptional situations, and in general, facilitating and simplifying the data plane processing.
The task will develop an edge-to-cloud – Control Plane architecture that will be cloud-agnostic. Several EDGE provisioning tools will be investigated to examine how they fulfil LifeChamps‘s healthcare supply chain requirements during this task. The EDGE provisioning tools that will be investigated include public multi-tenant services, private service providers, service providers operating within co-location facilities or on-premises service providers. This task’s main output is to enable scalability of the LifeChamps platform EDGE components for frailty assessment.
Service providers worldwide see a jump in EDGE devices’ operational challenges, year after year, due to the growing number of users, a divergence of the services provided, and the speed that the software is developed, deployed, reconfigured and updated. The network’s EDGE is facing the challenge of supporting a higher speed of configuration changes and must be seamlessly operated, managed, configured, monitored, and updated without any user intervention. Just like the Smart Infotainment system in your car- as a driver, you don’t know when it is updated or re-configured by the manufacturer since it can distract you from driving. The same applies in our case. The end-user shouldn’t be aware of any change in the EDGE device. Devices seamless operability directly impacts the customer experience and almost a non-negotiable thing for the elderly cancer patient.
The elements that will be taken into consideration in identifying the most suitable network architecture will be borrowed from the networking CUPS definition while examining:
- Remote registration of devices;
- Remote configuration of devices;
- Tools that assist in over the air updates (OTA Updates);
- Tools that assist in over the air deployment (OTA Deployment);
- Tools that assist in the monitoring of the remote devices;
- Improve Provisioning and Management of EDGE devices workloads.
