The majority of today’s vehicles operate in conditions with limited connectivity. With data connectivity rapidly expanding from luxury models and premium brands to high-volume mid-market models, the volume of data generated at the vehicle endpoint (i.e., the edge) will soon overwhelm cloud computing and communications infrastructure resources. As all vehicles become connected, the technical issue becomes how to send massive streams of data back to a central analytics framework over multiple network nodes. Moreover, those data will be coming from multiple locations around the world simultaneously – all within legacy low-bandwidth environments.
For many applications, placing the connected car’s data computation and analysis close to the edge is critical. This design allows for more efficient and faster decision-making locally, while also enabling transmission of the right data to a central location for analytics. For the future of the connected car ecosystem to succeed, it’s not a question of whether to perform edge processing principles – the problem is how to ensure meeting vehicle-centric requirements. Data gravity, latency, costs, and government regulations all drive decisions about where to perform processing. AECC’s work is to help ensure that industry standards, protocols, and processes will be designed to address critical vehicle technology requirements and can be implemented across the ecosystem as new connected vehicle communications and data infrastructures begin to take shape.