• Car guys form consortium to ensure they get what they need out of 5G and edge computing
• DENSO, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Toyota are to form the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium
• Automotive edge data generated will be 10 exabytes per month by 2025

Mention ‘low latency services’ and automobiles usually spring to mind. That’s because the autonomous car use case is the most often roped-in to get people excited about the prospects for 5G because it’s thought cars will need sub-millisecond response times from their access networks to reach the desired level of safe autonomy.

Hardly surprising, then, that the car guys have formed a consortium to make sure they get the sort of service they’re going to need from 5G spectrum-holders (whoever they are).

DENSO, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Toyota  have initiated the formation of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium which is tasked to develop an ecosystem for connected cars. It aims to   support emerging services such as intelligent driving, the creation of maps with real-time data and driving assistance based on cloud computing.

Data volumes are expected to be a big problem. It is estimated that the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes per month by around 2025 -  that’s approximately 10,000 times larger than the present volume.

That growth is expected to trigger the need for new architectures of network and computing infrastructure to support distributed resources and topology-aware storage capacity.

So the consortium will focus on increasing network capacity to accommodate automotive big data in a reasonable fashion between vehicles and the cloud by means of edge computing and more efficient network design. It will define requirements and develop use cases for emerging mobile devices with a particular focus on the automotive industry, bringing them to standards bodies, industry consortiums and solution providers. The consortium will also encourage the development of best practices for the distributed and layered computing approach recommended by the members.

In the coming months, the aforementioned companies will initiate activities to invite relevant global technology leaders and expand the consortium.