Consortium Seeks “Edge” for Connected Vehicles

Toyota, Denso, Intel and several other companies have formed a consortium to expand and improve cloud-computing capabilities to support “big data” requirements of emerging connected vehicle systems.

The partners estimate the data volume between vehicles and the cloud will exceed 10 exabytes per month by 2025—about 10,000 times more than the present volume—as autonomous, connected vehicle and precise real-time mapping technologies become more advanced and widespread. This will create a need for a new computing infrastructure and networked architectures.

The new Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) will focus on so-called “edge-computing” systems that push processing and analytic functions to sensors and other data sources rather than centralized nodes. The group also aims to develop more efficient network designs, define requirements for mobile devices and create best practices for distributed architectures.

AECC’s other founding members are Ericsson, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, NTT Docomo and Toyota InfoTechnology Center. Additional partners are expected to join in coming months.

AECC will work with the Edge Computing Consortium (ECC), which was formed last November to develop an open platform for cloud-computing. Beijing-based ECC includes Intel and several Chinese organizations and companies.