August 10, 2017

DENSO Corporation, Ericsson, Intel Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), NTT DOCOMO, INC., Toyota InfoTechnology Center Co., Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corporation today announced that they have initiated the formation of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. The objective of the consortium is to develop an ecosystem for connected cars to support emerging services such as intelligent driving, the creation of maps with real-time data and driving assistance based on cloud computing.

It is estimated that the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes per month around 2025, approximately 10,000 times larger than the present volume. This expected increase will trigger the need for new architectures of network and computing infrastructure to support distributed resources and topology-aware storage capacity. The architectures will be compliant with applicable standards, which requires collaboration on a local and global scale.

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.