How Real-time Event Streaming Improves Vehicle Mobility
- By Ceecee Wong
- April 20, 2020
In connected vehicle mobility, end-to-end visibility and management is critical.
Solace, whose data movement technology has been selected as a key infrastructure component of Singapore’s next-generation ERP system, proposes a system solution of real-time event-driven data streaming.
Sumeet Puri, senior vice president and global head of field technology at Solace, explains:
“The underlying network is provided by the telco. This connectivity forms the core backend. That same network carries different types of data — news, payment transactions, location information, etc. Real-time distribution of data between cars, other road users, infrastructure and applications is required for guaranteed deliveries of these data. This is where Solace’s PubSub+ Platform comes in with complete event streaming and management.”
The Solace event mesh, an event-streaming layer, sits on top of the telco’s underlying network. Applications can use the event mesh via an Open API to monitor the various network events.
Solace’s approach is unique in that the company publishes these events based on topics. “All these different events from location to emergency stops, acceleration, deceleration, proximity, are published under various topics. The applications on the server side in the backend will subscribe to the topics and information relevant to them. This whole notion of publishing information on topics and subscribing to the information that you are interested in, is essentially events-streaming. Events are being streamed on topics and event streams are being processed from the various perspectives.”
The Art of Scaling
According to Puri, “designing applications at scale is a different art altogether.”
Connecting 10,000 sensors or vehicles versus connecting 10 million is a different problem. For example, how do you direct and filter traffic to ensure that a message goes to a specific car out of the millions of connected cars?
“Your usual software doesn’t work because usually when we build software, we think of it as application down. You have to change your philosophy. At Solace, given our networking heritage, we think of these problems at scale, from network up. And apply this back to IoT,” says Puri.
The approach is now being adopted by leading companies. “We already have that architecture employed at Mercedes or Peugeot; we are the backbone of Reliance Jio in India and they’re already at about 150 million connected phones,” Puri adds.
Going the Distance
Solace states that distance, and associated latency, can be challenging for always-on setups like autonomous vehicles. It can render any IoT applications for automated accident-avoidance impractical.
“This is where our partnership with MobiledgeX comes in. They are creating this marketplace to bridge cloud and edge connectivity so that you can do this low-latency, real-time movement of data from anything — mobility to supply chains to even gaming,” says Puri.
By bringing the processing closer to the data source at the edge, MobiledgeX’s Edge-Cloud technology cuts down latency. This is necessary to establish reliable and real-time transmission of information, especially instructions critical for safety.
“Leading automakers are striving to transform their business from selling vehicles to providing hyper-personalized mobility services," says Eric Braun, chief commercial officer of MobiledgeX, “and such services hinge on cellular-to-vehicle-to-everything connectivity that is reliable, robust and responsive with minimal latency.”
The MobiledgeX platform places and executes workloads so vehicles can be continuously connected through 5G to edge-based services. When Solace’s PubSub+ real-time routing capabilities are integrated with MobiledgeX, there is a huge improvement in terms of safety and passenger experience.
The integrated solution offers end-to-end network latency of fewer than 10 milliseconds and end-to-end business service latency under 50 milliseconds. It also provides seamless interconnectivity across all modes of transportation and other ecosystems. Its shared security model offers trusted security within and across a global, multi-operator network infrastructure.
“The ability to offer services with millisecond response times, guaranteed by service level agreements,” says Ricardo Gomez-Ulmke, vice president of IoT at Solace, “means service providers can guarantee the safety of road users, across borders, 24/7. This gives them the power to re-invent the future of mobility.”
Photo credit: iStockphoto/Scharfsinn86