Background
In the realm of critical infrastructure management, ensuring the safety, reliability, and efficiency of systems such as power plants, oil refineries, and communication networks is paramount. Traditional inspection methods have their limitations, often requiring manual labor, high costs, and potential safety hazards. A private network with 5G-enabled wearable applications is employed to revolutionize the inspection process.
Private 5G networks provide low-latency, high-speed connections, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted communication between AR devices and control center. The convergence of wearable devices and private 5G network equips filed inspectors with instantaneous overlays of information, helping management to quickly identify potential issues, accelerate decision-making and prevent costly downtime.
Requirements
A leading Middle Eastern service provider required a secure and reliable edge computing platform for enabling Private 5G network, specifically for the AR inspection for critical infrastructure. The resulting joint effort incorporates Lanner’s industrial-grade hardware with the following requirements.
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Powerful Computing and Connectivity
As computing power is pushed from the cloud to the edge, new opportunities arise for edge workloads that benefit from low latency, near real-time analysis, and connectivity.
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Wide Operating Temperature
Given the extreme temperature in an underground environment, the appliance must be able to operate at a wide temperature range, ranging -40°C ~ 70°C, to sustain harsh environments without sacrificing operation safety and productivity.
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Multi-layer Hardware Security
An onboard TPM for secure crypto-processing and tamper resistance at the hardware level.
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Scalability
Expansion features are needed for better video transcoding performance even as demands increase, including swappable drive bays, PCIe slots for time sync cards, GPU graphics cards, or accelerator cards.
Solution
In essence, combining private 5G networks with augmented reality in the critical infrastructure inspection offers a transformative synergy that amplifies efficiency, safety, collaboration, and innovation across various operational aspects.
Lanner provides a wide range of network devices designed to enable 5G private networks in the mining industry. The combination of Lanner’s Open RAN appliances helps service providers to quickly deploy 5G private networks that increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve safety, while also enhancing the reliability and security of their communication networks.
The ECA-4027 works as a DU/CU server. The short-depth chassis edge computing appliance features a powerful 12 or 16-core Intel® Xeon® D-2100 processor, with 8x 10G SFP+ and 2x 40G QSFP+ ports for Edge Cloud, 5G Open RAN, and AI edge-focused applications.
With wide operating temperature, ECA-4027 was designed to leverage multi-access edge computing by supporting a PCI-E slot for FPGA, GPU, or optional IEEE 1588v2 SynE expansion, in addition to Intel® QuickAssist Technology for improved network performance.