[minutes] January 15 teleconference

Hi,

The minutes of our call today are available at:
  https://www.w3.org/2020/01/15-web-networks-minutes.html

and copied as text below.

Dom

                     Web & Networks teleconference

15 Jan 2020

   [2]Agenda

      [2]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-networks-ig/2019Dec/0001.html

Attendees

   Present
          Dominique_Hazael-Massieux, Chris_Needham, Larry_Zhao,
          Peipei_Guo, ykhuang, Piers_O_Hanlon, Dario_Sabella,
          Sudeep_Divakaran, Song_Xu, Eric_Siow, Louay_Bassbouss,
          Qiao, Zoltan_Kis

   Regrets

   Chair
          Sudeep, Song

   Scribe
          dom

Contents

     * [3]Topics
         1. [4]Agenda review
         2. [5]MEC in action: an overview of Edge computing
            activities
         3. [6]Accelerating DNNs for the Web with Edge Computing
     * [7]Summary of Action Items
     * [8]Summary of Resolutions
     __________________________________________________________

Agenda review

   Sudeep: happy new year to all IG members
   ... a few updates about upcoming meetings
   ... followed by two guest speakers: Dario Sabella from Intel,
   vice chair of MEC in ETSI
   ... involved in several industry groups focused on edge
   computing innovation
   ... then a talk by Prof. Qiao and Wangs from Beijing University
   of Posts and Telecommunications
   ... focused on machine learning and neural networks and impact
   on moving some of the compute to the edge
   ... before these talks, a few announces of upcoming meetings in
   February

   [9]Web & Networks IG meetings

      [9] https://www.w3.org/wiki/Networks#Meetings

   scribe: On Feb 5th, a review from Google on lessons learned
   while developing the Network Information API (implemented in
   some of the browsers)
   ... the API gives insights about network conditions
   ... and the Google folks will share what they learned in the
   process of developing and deploying that API
   ... On Feb 13th, a presentation by Michael Mccool, co-chair of
   the Web of Things Working Group
   ... will give insights on the intersection of service worker /
   web worker in the context of edge computing

MEC in action: an overview of Edge computing activities

   [10]Dario's slides

     [10]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2020Jan/att-0001/01-part

   Dario: this presentation gives an overview of the topic - we
   won't cover everything, but the slides are further references
   ... this is an overview on edge computing - not an exhaustive
   view, but hopefully an interesting view of the topic
   ... there is a wide consensus on the revenue potential from
   edge computing
   ... I'm part of the standards body, vice-chairman of the ETSI
   MEC standard
   ... there are other standard bodies and industry groups
   covering different aspects of edge computing
   ... I've helped coordinate an Intel white paper covering the
   various standard bodies
   ... where you can find more relevant information
   ... there are many activities reflecting the need to cover many
   different aspects
   ... there are commercial products, open source projects
   ... in addition to ETSI, 3GPP is defining how to implement MEC
   in a cellular network
   ... The KPIs of MEC include: improved latency naturally, but
   there are other KPIs e.g. cost savings
   ... each vertical might have different needs from edge:
   performance is key, but not necessarily just latency
   ... [slide 7: where is the edge?]
   ... The definition of where the edge is intentionally foggy
   ... the answer is "it depends"
   ... it can be at differently level of distance from the end
   user
   ... there is a trade-off of performance & cost when scaling MEC
   deployments
   ... there is flexibility in deployment options
   ... [ETSI MEC]
   ... MEC stands for Multi-Access Edge Computing (initially
   Mobile Edge Computing)
   ... it's not only for cellular operators, but other access
   methods (incl wifi, fixed access)
   ... MEC is cloud computing at the network edge
   ... the standards group has participation from a wide set of
   participants, from the wide ecosystem
   ... 98 partners amont MEC members and participatns
   ... "MEC offers to app developers and content providers
   cloud-computing capabilities and an IT service environment at
   the edge of the network"
   ... 3GPP is starting to work seriously on the topic
   ... we're a committed to build a consistent story across
   standard bodies
   ... [slide 11: MEC architecture]
   ... this is network agnostic, not based on a particular access
   method
   ... it is inspired by the ETSI NFV framework
   ... this produces services, but can also consume services that
   would exposed to other applications
   ... the client side can communicate through the @@@ interface
   that instantiates a proxy application in the MEC side

   Song: I would like to know which part of the specification is
   the most interesting for developers

   Dario: from a dev perspective, we have written a white paper
   and organized a webinar to address this topic
   ... as a developer, the information I would need to use a MEC
   system is given in slide 12
   ... developers don't need to know about the underlying
   infrastructure, they want to use the services
   ... there are different type of categories of specifications in
   MEC
   ... starting from MEC 016, UE Application interface
   ... and general principles for API
   ... (restfull, http, data structures)
   ... there are freely available OpenAPI representations of these
   APIs
   ... the rest of the specs are less relevant to developers
   directly

   [11]Developing Software for Multi-Access Edge Computing

     [11]
https://www.etsi.org/images/files/ETSIWhitePapers/etsi_wp20ed2_MEC_SoftwareDevelopment.pdf

   Dario: we are not preventing that new service APIs can be
   implemented without standardization as long as they follow the
   API principles
   ... we're not aiming at providing the full list of APIs
   ... [slide 13: OpenAPI description files, MEC 0023]
   ... for interoperability, we have standardized a number of APIs
   that have been required by the industry
   ... the OpenAPI representations of the APIs are available on
   forge.etsi.org
   ... We have other activities in ETSI MEC beyond the traditional
   standardization work
   ... we want to engage the ecosystem - app developers aren't
   interested in reading specs, they want to develop their
   services
   ... that's why we've been developing Proof-of-concepts,
   promoting MEC via hackathons
   ... and MEC deployment trials

   [12]MEC Hackathon Framework

     [12] https://mecwiki.etsi.org/index.php?title=MEC_Hackathon_Framework

   scribe: there is an upcoming hackathon in April, with an open
   call for developers with a focus on Android
   ... an example of a standardized API, led by Intel, is the MEC
   V2X API (vehicle-to-everything)
   ... this is related to automotive
   ... slide 16 shows the list of foreseen functionalities
   ... this is a stable draft
   ... it helps with interop across car makers and operators
   ... [overview of the API structure]
   ... one of the methods is predicted_qos - we're not
   standardizing who is producing that info, just how it is
   exposed
   ... [MEC use cases]
   ... MEC GS 002 collects our use cases - it shows the use cases
   supported by MEC
   ... there are 3 categories: consumer-oriented services (e.g.
   app computation off-loading)
   ... operator and third-party services (not directly for the
   benefit of the end-user)
   ... and network perf and QoE improvements - this can be fully
   transparent to the user
   ... [App Computation Offloading]
   ... This allows the MEC host to execute compute-intensive
   functionalities with high perf than the mobile devices, both
   from a time and energy perspective
   ... the trade-off is the cost (computing, power, time) of
   transmitting the data
   ... this has to be analyzed on a case by case basis to evaluate
   how useful the offloading is
   ... examples incl video processing, AI, ML
   ... app offloading could benefit from being requested from the
   client-side, e.g. via a Web API
   ... this may need a counterpart work in ETSI (not planned at
   the moment)
   ... [5GAA]
   ... I also wanted to touch on what we're doing in 5GAA (5G
   Automotive Associated) where MEC is a key technology
   ... this is where the predicted QoS work emerges, which was
   demonstrated in November

   Sudeep: maybe let's keep this for discussion with Google in
   February

   Dario: makes sense

Accelerating DNNs for the Web with Edge Computing

   [13]Prof. Qiao's slides

     [13]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2020Jan/att-0001/Accelerating_DNNs_for_the_Web_with_Edge_Computing.pptx

   Qiao: the topic is accelerating deep neural networks for the
   Web with edge computing
   ... deep neural networks show great promise in providing more
   intelligence to Web applications
   ... there are typical execution schemes: javascript/Web
   Assembly on the client - but that requires loading heavy DNN
   models (e.g. ~100 MB)
   ... the other more common approach is to run the model on the
   remote cloud
   ... but that requires sending large amount of data to the
   cloud, increases computing pressure, and creates privacy
   concern (e.g. for home security camera)
   ... Mobile Edge computing is providing an important
   infrastructure via 5G
   ... it allows to reduce the burden from the core network and
   reduces the in-device computing cost
   ... so we would need to dynamically distribute the computing
   around the various ndoes
   ... the client would only need to download a small part of the
   model and keep the privacy-sensitive data on-device
   ... the challenge is how to provide this offloading in a
   changing network conditions
   ... we introduce an efficient branch to the traditional neural
   networks
   ... it can help accelerate the inference on the Web with
   collaborative mechanism on the edge server
   ... [slide 6]
   ... network conditions and device computing capabilities can
   change dynamically
   ... this requires a context-aware algorithm that takes into
   account these parameters
   ... we propose an adaptive framework
   ... with a web runtime adapter, with a model optimized for
   mobile users
   ... depending on whether a set of conditions are satisified,
   some of the computing is offloaded to the edge and the cloud
   ... [slide 7]
   ... Is there a better metaphor to distribute computing on the
   Web?
   ... how can we make it easier to use edge computing for web
   developers?
   ... how can we detect when using edge computing is the most
   efficient approach (e.g. network conditions, computing
   capabilities of the end device)

   Sudeep: thank you - very interesting and relevant use case
   ... relevant both to MEC and network quality prediction
   ... also intersections with the WebNN work in W3C and the Web
   of Things work (service and capability discovery)
   ... we will have to continue investigating this discussion

   Song: +1

   Sudeep: we need to look at what kind of APIs, what needs to be
   down in the browser context vs in-apps
   ... thank you everyone

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

   [End of minutes]

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2020 15:50:54 UTC