The work program for the Small Cell Forum for the coming year covers “every aspect of densification,” including policy improvements for siting and spectrum, 5G-enabling technologies and the next iteration of its enterprise action plan, according to SCF.

One of the work items focuses on the edge computing landscape, which the forum describes as an excellent example of an area where a common framework will be essential to avoid fragmentation—but one where every operator will deploy differently to support different use cases.

Indeed, the pushing of intelligence, processing and cloud services to the edge of the network is making the small cell into a “gold mine” by adding many more services to the connectivity, according to SCF. Technologies like ETSI’s Multi-access Edge Computing or the OpenFog initiative, which is now the basis of an IEEE standard, are ways to distribute cloud services widely and bring them close to the users, supported along with radios on small cells equipped with processors or in separate miniservers. The distributed topology reduces latency and backhaul costs and improves responsiveness and QoS for users, the forum notes.