Super-Edge Node Enabled by Wireless Mesh and Its Evolution Toward Universal Platform for Digital Twin Dominated World

ABSTRACT

With COVID-19 as an initiation, the stage for human socioeconomic activities is rapidly shifting from physical space to cyberspace. Mobile networks have evolved as essential communication networks for connecting individuals and things to the cloud. Further evolution of mobile networks is essential to realize Digital Twin. In particular, low latency and guaranteed QoS using network slicing are extremely challenging requirements that legacy mobile networks until 4G have not been able to meet. In addition, the chronic shortage of spectrum accompanying the shift to broadband continues to encourage the use of small cells, which naturally make xHaul1 denotes a term that expresses either fronthaul, midhaul or backhaul. problem be more serious. The author has worked on this xHaul problem in both academia and industry for 20 years, developing a unique WLAN mesh protocol for backhaul. In order to bring the results of this research to practical use, PicoCELA Inc. as a vehicle for commercialization of the fruits, was incorporated. The edge device brought by PicoCELA with the WLAN mesh capability are linked to a cloud server and are serving various applications as a general-purpose platform to facilitate the introduction of Digital Twin. This paper reviews the history of WLAN mesh technology to date, identifies the technical issues that arise when using it in an enterprise scenario, and then provides an overview of how PicoCELA' s WLAN mesh addresses these issues. The PicoCELA solution as an edge platform is overviewed, followed by some real-world use cases. Finally, the outlook for mobile communications in the future is summarized. © 2022 IEEE.