Connected Vehicles Will Require New Infrastructure to Deliver and Process Data

By 2025, 100 million connected vehicles will be transmitting 10 billion gigabytes of data per month. A new report by the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium offers insight into a cross-industry solution to meeting this demand.

As the number of connected vehicles in operation rises, the networks that deliver and process data will have to deal with “unprecedented and ever-increasing volumes of data from a rapidly moving vehicle,” a new white paper reports.

The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) projects that by 2025 the number of connected vehicles will grow to about 100 million globally and the data volume transmitted between vehicles and the cloud will be about 10 exabytes — 10 billion gigabytes — of data per month.

The white paper published Wednesday (Sept. 22) by AECC, Distributed Computing in an AECC System, addresses distributed computing best practices for managing connected vehicles’ high data volumes. Among the companies represented on the AECC board of directors are Toyota, Intel, Ericsson, DENSO, Samsung, Dell-EMC, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and KDDI Research.

“For connected vehicles, the amount of uploaded data is massive, concentrated (in time and location) and often time sensitive,” the report says.

Ever-Increasing Volumes of Data

For standard consumer mobility services data transfer flows mostly one way — as downloads from the provider to the consumer. For connected vehicles, on the other hand, the primary direction of data transfer is uploads from the vehicle to the provider.

To provide desired service levels, the mobility service may need to use different mobility service instances such as ones that are close to the vehicle — hence the need for distributed computing capability in an AECC system.

In the white paper, the AECC Technical Solutions Working Group provides vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), mobile network operators (MNOs) and the service provider ecosystem with an overview of distributed computing requirements and architecture for deploying connected vehicle service solutions that meet new data communications use case requirements.

The paper recommends a distributed off-vehicle computing environment to support the mobility services for the hundreds of millions of future connected vehicles.

With mobility services both decentralized and distributed between center and edge locations, it explains, they will be closer to the vehicle, able to provide faster responses to requests from vehicles and able to offload the cloud and transport networks.

Distributed Computing

AECC is an association of cross-industry, global leaders working to explore the rapidly evolving and significant data and communications needs involved in instrumenting billions of vehicles worldwide.

Its goal is to find more efficient ways to support distributed computing and infrastructure network architectures to support the high-volume data needed for intelligent vehicle services.