3 ms·

I often see latency being touted as the game changer for 5G. With compute being pushed out closer to customers "Mobile Edge Compute" Could anyone enlighten m

by Jonnax 8y ago

I often see latency being touted as the game changer for 5G. With compute being pushed out closer to customers "Mobile Edge Compute" Could anyone enlighten me to what the use cases are? Because it's still dubious.

ForHackernews 8y ago
> With compute being pushed out closer to customers "Mobile Edge Compute" That seems implausible to me. We already have the equivalent of supercomputers in our pockets, and yet the trend is to move computing away from the end user, onto centralized servers.
- ghaff 8y ago
  In some ways but not in others. Edge Computing is actually a pretty hot area in telco but also other areas. One of the issues is that there’s so much data being collected, some of which needs real-time action, that you need distributed computing to filter and take actions based on rules. This edge computing can be fairly substantial.
niftich 8y ago
The most instantly recognizable one, with a clear commercial potential, is cloud gaming. Other fuzzier ones are, uh, crunch live video or audio captured by the device via beefy compute to... display overlays? Search similar products? Live translation? Calculate evasive maneuvers? A lot of these are limited by interface concerns that introduce human or other 'latency' anyway, making connectivity latency between the base station where the 'edge' is, and the device itself less of an issue.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  The latency needs for online gaming aren't as stringent as you might think. I have a Samsung TV which, if it is not in "game mode" introduces much more latency than my DSL internet. I couldn't win at Titanfall at all with the TV in normal mode, in game mode I was able to progress halfway up the leaderboard. So far as I can tell, "Edge" is for people who think AWS isn't expensive enough and they'd rather pay AT&T or American Tower prices.
  - flyingpenguin 8y ago
    Except I have 4-8ms ping on my internet, with rare peaks at 20ms. I have between 40ms and 200ms on 4g. Average around 80, with often peaks above 300ms.
  - jungler 8y ago
    With the gaming scenario some distinction between display latency and network latency is worth reviewing. Network latency is something that software can cover for in some degree(to create online experiences there's always some kind of synchronization of different wallclock timelines going on). Display latency is universal, though. A faster display will let the game give you feedback faster, so long as we are talking about feedback in the local experience(so: aiming, movement are commonly predicted on the client, while hit registration often uses a server roundtrip). This separation of responsibilities allowed people to play Counter-Strike 1.x on 200ms dial-up connections back in the 2000's. When it's a pure video feed you get the impact of all the latency all the time, and that means the problem has to be solved with brute force reduction of bottlenecks everywhere. So how much latency is enough for responsiveness? This is pretty easy to derive from the common target framerates: for 30hz display, you need 33.3ms. For 60hz, 16.6ms, for 120hz, 8.3ms. Since perceptual latency is known to keep improving up through 144hz it's reasonable to say that we should be looking for only 5-6ms at most, while most broadband connections are still achieving pings in the 20-100ms range, depending on the game and the specific connection. On the very best connections, that is, we can assume a "30hz transparent" video stream, which is fine for casual experiences but severely impacts competitive ability when tested. In many current popular titles this manifests in mechanics that are both latency sensitive and require a server roundtrip, e.g. building in Fortnite.
posterboy 8y ago
Yeah I'm totally going to tell you what I'm currently working on because I like random competition so much :) really though, the waves aren't faster than lightspeed. Although lightspeed in different media might depend on frequency, indeed, I do not think that's the problem, rather than congestion, because the refraction index of Air is close to 1. Congestion is a typical problem, though. ""Mobile Edge Compute"", what about "capsule networks"?
gsich 8y ago
It just means that the last mile over the air will only add 1ms of latency. Compared to LTE which I think has around 5ms. The rest of the network (read Internet) is still just as fast as before.

by Jonnax 8y ago

ForHackernews 8y ago

> With compute being pushed out closer to customers "Mobile Edge Compute" That seems implausible to me. We already have the equivalent of supercomputers in our pockets, and yet the trend is to move computing away from the end user, onto centralized servers.

ghaff 8y ago
In some ways but not in others. Edge Computing is actually a pretty hot area in telco but also other areas. One of the issues is that there’s so much data being collected, some of which needs real-time action, that you need distributed computing to filter and take actions based on rules. This edge computing can be fairly substantial.

niftich 8y ago

The most instantly recognizable one, with a clear commercial potential, is cloud gaming. Other fuzzier ones are, uh, crunch live video or audio captured by the device via beefy compute to... display overlays? Search similar products? Live translation? Calculate evasive maneuvers? A lot of these are limited by interface concerns that introduce human or other 'latency' anyway, making connectivity latency between the base station where the 'edge' is, and the device itself less of an issue.

PaulHoule 8y ago
The latency needs for online gaming aren't as stringent as you might think. I have a Samsung TV which, if it is not in "game mode" introduces much more latency than my DSL internet. I couldn't win at Titanfall at all with the TV in normal mode, in game mode I was able to progress halfway up the leaderboard. So far as I can tell, "Edge" is for people who think AWS isn't expensive enough and they'd rather pay AT&T or American Tower prices.
- flyingpenguin 8y ago
  Except I have 4-8ms ping on my internet, with rare peaks at 20ms. I have between 40ms and 200ms on 4g. Average around 80, with often peaks above 300ms.
- jungler 8y ago
  With the gaming scenario some distinction between display latency and network latency is worth reviewing. Network latency is something that software can cover for in some degree(to create online experiences there's always some kind of synchronization of different wallclock timelines going on). Display latency is universal, though. A faster display will let the game give you feedback faster, so long as we are talking about feedback in the local experience(so: aiming, movement are commonly predicted on the client, while hit registration often uses a server roundtrip). This separation of responsibilities allowed people to play Counter-Strike 1.x on 200ms dial-up connections back in the 2000's. When it's a pure video feed you get the impact of all the latency all the time, and that means the problem has to be solved with brute force reduction of bottlenecks everywhere. So how much latency is enough for responsiveness? This is pretty easy to derive from the common target framerates: for 30hz display, you need 33.3ms. For 60hz, 16.6ms, for 120hz, 8.3ms. Since perceptual latency is known to keep improving up through 144hz it's reasonable to say that we should be looking for only 5-6ms at most, while most broadband connections are still achieving pings in the 20-100ms range, depending on the game and the specific connection. On the very best connections, that is, we can assume a "30hz transparent" video stream, which is fine for casual experiences but severely impacts competitive ability when tested. In many current popular titles this manifests in mechanics that are both latency sensitive and require a server roundtrip, e.g. building in Fortnite.

posterboy 8y ago

Yeah I'm totally going to tell you what I'm currently working on because I like random competition so much :) really though, the waves aren't faster than lightspeed. Although lightspeed in different media might depend on frequency, indeed, I do not think that's the problem, rather than congestion, because the refraction index of Air is close to 1. Congestion is a typical problem, though. ""Mobile Edge Compute"", what about "capsule networks"?

gsich 8y ago

It just means that the last mile over the air will only add 1ms of latency. Compared to LTE which I think has around 5ms. The rest of the network (read Internet) is still just as fast as before.