The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium will develop an ecosystem for connected cars to support emerging services such as intelligent driving and transport, creating of maps with real-time data as well as driving assistance based on cloud computing.
Joining Toyota InfoTechnology Center and Toyota Motor Corporation are auto manufactirer, DENSO Corporation, telecommunications company, Ericsson, semiconductor manufacturer, Intel Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation DOCOMO.
The vehicle manufacturer estimates that the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will reach 10 exabytes (10.7 billion Gigabytes) per month till the year 2025, which is approximately 10,000 times larger than the present volume.
According to the consortium, with the increase in data volume, there will be a need for new architectures of network and computing infrastructure to support distributed resources and topology-aware storage capacity. The body will be working towards making the architectures compliant with the applicable standards to include local and global collaboration.
Using edge computing and network design, the consortium claims to focus on increasing network capacity to accommodate automotive big data in a reasonable fashion between vehicles and the cloud.
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 claims that it will also encourage the development of best practices for the distributed and layered computing approach, which has been recommended by the members, and in the next few months initiate activities to invite relevant global technology leaders and expand the consortium.
Interestingly, apart from kick-starting the consortium, Toyota has also made an investment of $96 million to Preferred Networks for accelerating a joint research and development of AI technology in the mobility field including autonomous driving. In May this year, Toyota Research Institute along with MIT’s Media Lab and a few partners to see how blockchain technology can be applied to the car industry and how people can become comfortable with autonomous technologies.
