This section provides an overview on the existing work in GSMA and ETSI MEC relevant to the EDGEAPP architecture describing the OP roles, existing mapping and alignment aspects provided by GSMA OP and ETSI MEC in clause 4.2 and clause 4.3 respectively.

The Operator Platform (OP) as defined by GSMA OPG in GSMA PRD OPG.02 [3], guides the industry to define a common solution for exposing network capabilities and edge compute resources to enterprise customers and developers allowing monetization of those capabilities. The technical requirements, functional blocks and interfaces characteristics of such a generic platform to facilitate access to the Edge Cloud capability of an operator or federation of operators and their partners are provided in GSMA PRD OPG.02 [3]. GSMA PRD OPG.02 [3] also provides mapping of these requirements and architectures to the specifications from certain SDOs. The integration of OP with the mobile network takes place using the Southbound Interface-Network Resources (SBI-NR) through the set of APIs specified in GSMA PRD OPG.03 [12] which is linked to the corresponding 3GPP-defined APIs. GSMA PRD OPG.04 [13] specifies the set of APIs for the interactions/operations over the East/West Bound Interface (E/WBI), which enables an OP to share network and edge capabilities with other OP(s). The E/WBI interactions enable the management of a federation (i.e. creation/update/removal), management of the application onboarding in the federation, edge node discovery, etc. The APIs for the interactions between OP and the User Client (UC) are provided in GSMA PRD OPG.05 [14]. The interactions between OP and the User Client (UC) are supported by the User-to-Network Interface (UNI), allowing the UC to discover the existence of an Edge Cloud service, to register to the OP's Service Resource Manager (SRM), to trigger the selection of a cloudlet (a point of presence for the Edge Cloud offering a set of resources at a particular location as specified in GSMA PRD OPG.02 [3]) by the OP, to trigger the instantiation of an application instance on the selected cloudlet.

Figure 4.3-1 shows the MEC reference architecture as specified by ETSI ISG MEC. This reference architecture describes the functional elements that comprise the multi-access edge system and the reference points between them. It consists of MEC host and MEC management system necessary to run MEC Applications within an operator network or a subset of an operator network. The MEC platform is the collection of essential functionalities required to run MEC applications on a particular Virtualisation infrastructure and enable them to provide and consume MEC services. MEC applications are instantiated on the Virtualisation infrastructure of the MEC host based on configuration or requests validated by the MEC management. An already instantiated MEC application can optionally register with MEC platform. The application registration procedure allows an authorized MEC application instance to provide its information to the MEC platform [5]. The Mp1 reference point between the MEC platform and the MEC applications provides service registration, service discovery, and communication support for services. It also provides other functionality such as application availability, session state relocation support procedures, traffic rules and DNS rules activation, access to persistent storage and time of day information, etc. The Mp3 reference point between MEC platforms is used for control communication between MEC platforms. ETSI ISG MEC also provides Multi-access system reference architecture variants for the deployment in an NFV environment and for MEC federation [4] as shown in Figure 4.3-2. In [6], ETSI ISG MEC specifies "Federation enablement APIs" that enable the shared usage of MEC services and applications across different systems (e.g., MEC system, Cloud system).