We show that the onset and rise of QCD mini-jets provide the dynamical mechanism behind the appearance of a soft edge in pp collisions around ISR energies and thus such a soft edge is built in our mini-jet model with soft gluon resummation. Here the model is optimized for LHC at $sqrt{s} = 7, 8 TeV$ and predictions made for higher LHC and cosmic ray energies. Further, we provide a phenomenological picture to discuss the breakup of the total cross-section into its elastic, uncorrelated and correlated inelastic pieces in the framework of a one-channel eikonal function.