Guenter Klas

Guenter Klas is a senior member of Vodafone Group R&D. He is responsible for research and engagement in standardisation and industry organisations related to networks and enablement of new services e.g. for the Internet of Things and vertical industry sectors. This includes topics from next generation fiber, SDN, NFV to areas like device management, service enablement - and edge computing. His group is shaping strategy, requirements and architecture for new systems incl. 5G. Guenter's team is active in numerous organisations and projects, from GSMA, NGMN, 3GPP to OMA, IETF, ETSI and others.

Previously, Guenter held various other senior positions in Vodafone, from leading the Group's engagement in Industry Initiatives to heading System Design in its UK operation. Before that, he held roles in telecoms product management, systems engineering and research with Siemens in Germany. Guenter has a PhD in Computer Science from Technical University Munich and a Masters in Electrical Engineering.

Keynote Presentation Title: Computing at the Edge - A Carrier Perspective

Keynote Abstract: This keynote presentation aims at setting the scene from a telecommunications carrier point of view. It will look at the different notions and flavours of edge computing that have emerged, from Cloudlets to Fog Computing, from the notion of Edge in IoT to extensions of hyperscale datacentres to the edge, from Mobile Edge Computing MEC to distributed telco cloud in the context of 5G cellular networks. In addition we will highlight relationships to technology evolution that happens in other areas, e.g. Enterprise. The presentation will sketch a number of application areas that we believe can benefit from edge computing in the years to come. Though lots of technology is already there, challenges remain. We'll first explain some of the business issues we see with respect to commercialising edge computing in a telecoms environment (e.g. "where is the edge", "connectivity for the edge", "NFV versus cloud integration"). Next we’ll highlight some of the key technical challenges we see in particular from a carrier’s perspective before finishing with an outlook and call to action for research and industry.