Efficiency of routing traffic to an edge compute server at the far edge of a cellular network

In a fifth generation (5G) cellular network including a core network, a radio access network (RAN), and an edge portion having a near edge and a far edge, a system for improving efficiency of routing edge compute traffic from a user equipment (UE) to an edge compute server at the far edge, the system comprising:

• one or more processors;
• memory in electronic communication with the one or more processors;
• and
• instructions stored in the memory, the instructions being executable by the one or more processors to:
• provision a near edge control unit (CU) and a near edge user plane function (UPF) at the near edge of the edge portion of the 5G cellular network in response to detecting under-utilized computing resources at the far edge, components of the near edge being implemented on a first set of servers being located closer to the radio units of the RAN than a datacenter that hosts one or more components of the core network;
• provision a far edge CU, a far edge UPF, and an edge compute workload at the far edge of the edge portion of the 5G cellular network, components of the far edge being implemented on a second set of servers being located closer to radio units of the RAN than the first set of servers of the near edge;
• receive UE traffic at one or more distributed units on the second set of servers of the far edge, the UE traffic comprising edge compute traffic and non-edge compute traffic;
• identify the edge compute traffic among the UE traffic;
• route the edge compute traffic of the UE traffic to the edge compute workload on the second set of servers at the far edge;
• route the non-edge compute traffic of the UE traffic to the near edge UPF on the first set of servers at the near edge;
• consume telemetry of a current load at the far edge based on physical layer processing operations performed by one or more distributed units on the far edge;
• detect, based on the telemetry, that the current load at the second set of servers at the far edge exceeds a first threshold level;
• and
• in response to determining that the current load at the second set of servers at the far edge exceeds the first threshold level:
• cause the edge compute workload at the second set of servers at the far edge to be migrated to the first set of servers at the near edge;
• and
• deprovision the far edge CU, the far edge UPF, and the edge compute workload at the far edge.

In a fifth generation (5G) cellular network including a core network, a radio access network (RAN), and an edge portion having a near edge and a far edge, a non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions thereon that, when executed by at least one processor, causes one or more computing devices to:

• provision a near edge control unit (CU) and a near edge user plane function (UPF) at the near edge of the edge portion of the 5G cellular network in response to detecting under-utilized computing resources at the far edge, components of the near edge being implemented on a first set of servers being located closer to the radio units of the RAN than a datacenter that hosts one or more components of the core network;
• provision a far edge CU, a far edge UPF, and an edge compute workload at the far edge of the edge portion of the 5G cellular network, components of the far edge being implemented on a second set of servers being located closer to radio units of the RAN than the first set of servers of the near edge;
• receive UE traffic at one or more distributed units on the second set of servers of the far edge, the UE traffic comprising edge compute traffic and non-edge compute traffic;
• identify the edge compute traffic among the UE traffic;
• route the edge compute traffic of the UE traffic to the edge compute workload on the second set of servers at the far edge;
• route the non-edge compute traffic of the UE traffic to the near edge UPF on the first set of servers at the near edge;
• consume telemetry of a current load at the far edge based on physical layer processing operations performed by one or more distributed units on the far edge;
• detect, based on the telemetry, that the current load at the second set of servers at the far edge exceeds a first threshold level;
• and
• in response to determining that the current load at the second set of servers at the far edge exceeds the first threshold level:
• cause the edge compute workload at the second set of servers at the far edge to be migrated to the first set of servers at the near edge;
• and
• deprovision the far edge CU, the far edge UPF, and the edge compute workload at the far edge.