Cisco Transportation Solutions Architect: ‘In any vehicle, seconds matter for passenger and pedestrian safety. In connected vehicles, milliseconds matter more’
Cisco and Verizon took to Las Vegas to demonstrate how cellular and mobile edge compute (MEC) technology can enable low-latency autonomous driving solutions without using physical Roadside Units (Rus). For cities, like Vegas, that already have public MEC technologies in place, this strategy represents a more cost effective, “simpler and more efficient route” to enabling autonomous vehicle applications, said the companies.
In a blog post, Cisco Transportation Solutions Architect Mark Knellinger explained the importance of speedy communication when it comes to autonomous driving: “In any vehicle, seconds matter for passenger and pedestrian safety. In connected vehicles, milliseconds matter more,” he said.
Currently, this low-latency communication between vehicles and surrounding connected infrastructure is achieved using roadside radio units, which extend the radio signals, therefore, reducing the communication time. However, these radio units are costly and take time to deploy.
But now, Cisco and Verizon argue they have “proved” that they can replace these units with a combination of the carrier’s LTE network, public 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength and the vendor’s Catalyst IR1101 routers and still meet the latency thresholds required for autonomous driving applications.
In fact, by using LTE and edge compute to virtualize the role of the Roadside Units, C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-everything) communications proved to be more streamlined, which Verizon and Cisco said will likely lead to improved efficiency and cost effectiveness for municipalities, infrastructure providers and application developers working with autonomous vehicles.
“This test is a huge milestone in proving that the future of connectivity for IoT applications can be powered by cellular,” said Krishna Iyer, director of Systems Architecture at Verizon. “We’re marking the strength of mobile edge compute platforms for connected transportation innovation with much more streamlined architecture. Together with Cisco technologies, we’re setting the foundation potentially to realize a ubiquitous IoT in the connected and autonomous future of driving.”
