Challenges to support Edge-as-a-Service Steven Davy Waterford Institute of Technology Jeroen Famaey Ghent University - iMinds Joan Serrat and Juan Luis Gorricho Universitat Politecnica de Catalunyna Avi Miron Technion Israel Institute of Technology Manos Dramitinos Athens University of Economics and Business Research Center Pedro Miguel Neves Portugal Telecom Inovacao SA Steven Latré University of Antwerp - iMinds Ezer Goshen BandWD Abstract—A new era in telecommunications is emerging. Vir- tualised networking functions and resources will offer network operators a way to shift the balance of expenditure from capital to operational, opening up networks to new and innovative services. This paper introduces the concept of Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS), a means of harnessing the flexibility of virtualised network functions and resources to enable network operators to break the tightly coupled relationship they have with their infrastructure and to enable more effective ways of generating revenue. To achieve this vision, we envisage a virtualised service access interface that can be used to programmatically alter access network functions and resources available to service providers in an elastic fashion. EaaS has many technically and economically difficult challenges that must be addressed before it can become a reality; the main challenges are summarised in this paper. I. I NTRODUCTION The current networking landscape locks network opera- tors into a traditional business model wherein deployment of a dedicated access network is a prerequisite. This has resulted in staggering costs, and in stagnation of the tradi- tional telecommunications business, as a consequence, much of the innovation is happening “over-the-top”. The increasing demand for higher capacity broadband networks is urging the rapid deployment of multiple types of access networks across the world, often consisting of completely new technology solutions. Network operators are beginning to modernize their infrastructure but need to be able to effectively keep capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) under control, in particular when faced with falling average revenues per user (ARPU). This is proving to be a difficult challenge; primarily due to current competition models for network operators. They offer extensive stand-alone infrastruc- tures, in an effort to keep up with the demand, but with little or no incentive to differentiate their services. Current structures also lock them down in a race-to-the-bottom competition, offering ever more bandwidth for lower returns on investment and with few options to drastically lower CAPEX and OPEX. There is an opportunity for network operators to “open up” secure and limited access to their networks through the use of network function virtualisation [1], [2] and network resource virtualisation [3], [4]. Network virtualisation is the process of multiplexing physical network resources, to appear as dedicated networks with particular dynamic properties such as on-demand growth in capacity and size, flexible provisioning of new routes, new end-points and new address schemes. When coupled with network programmability [5], [6], new network functions and services can be deployed into the virtual networks to support more adaptive delivery of services to network users. The concept of leveraging network virtualisation to facilitate the flexible usage of access network resources is called “Edge- as-a-Service”. This term has connotations with Infrastructure- as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. Effectively, it involves applying concepts of cloud computing directly into access networks. Access network resources, such as base stations, radio network controllers, DSLAMs and even wireless access points, are the points in the network of closest attachment to the network end-users. EaaS enables the flexible sharing of these resources among interested service providers, where they can make use of network programmability to distribute service enabling functionality (content caching, multiplexing or other data plane processing) and whereby they can make use of network virtualisation to request or relinquish resources based on service demand. There are a number of difficult challenges related to the full realisation of the EaaS concept and we present a detailed anal- ysis of these challenges in this paper. The challenges can be classified as technical, including the large scale virtualisation of heterogeneous access network resources and functions; and economical, including how best to predict service demand and pro-actively adapt service price and quality. In section II we present the current state of the telecommunications sectors and outline some of the current practices in use today to alleviate escalating network costs. In section III we propose that a new type of network interface can be used to offer a solution to network providers. A scenario is outlined in section IV. Section V presents a series of technical and socio-economic challenges that must be researched to aid in realising EaaS, and these are discussed with respect to state of the art. Finally, conclusions are presented in section VI.