By Said Tabet, AECC - Article first published in HIGHLIGHTS Issue 01, Sept. 2020.

In July 2020, the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) published Version 2.0 of the technical report, Driving Data to the Edge: The Challenge of Data Traffic Distribution. The report provides authoritative best practices on ways the ecosystem can enable secure, cost-effective data delivery and processing on a global scale, it also includes technology solutions around six key issues: edge data offloading, mobility service provider server selection, vehicle system reachability, access network selection, provisioning and configuration update and opportunistic data transfer.

By offering recommendations to vehicle OEMs, MNOs and the service provider ecosystem, the report provides ways to optimize service offerings to meet the growing needs of connected vehicle owners and users.
The findings of the report provide a lot of material that will be of use to 3GPP in future specifications for V2X use cases. One area of work will be to move beyond only considering latency-sensitive safety applications; to begin to address the big data capacity growth between vehicles and the cloud.

We have a lot to do to get the current mobile communication network architectures and cloud computing deployments fully optimized to effectively handle emerging requirements of Connected Vehicles. 

We are now working to align the output from the AECC Use Case Development (WG1) and the AECC Technical Solution (WG2) to the work in 3GPP. For example, AECC use cases and requirements are suitable input for 3GPP. The AECC WG2 solution profiling in the technical report can be shared with 3GPP as a liaison contribution through our activities as a 3GPP market partner (MRP), since April this year - Specifically, to the relevant 3GPP groups, including TSG SA, WGs SA1, SA2, and SA6.

As a partner in 3GPP, the AECC will collaborate with the broader 3GPP membership in the joint identification of future standards work and on a gap analysis on what will be needed from 3GPP to ensure that connected vehicles benefit from best-in-class specifications for driving data to the edge.

We look forward to an active liaison and collaboration and to getting feedback from 3GPP on AECC automotive use cases and technical solutions. The AECC Liaison Relationship Strategy Committee (LRSC) is responsible for the creation and maintenance of liaisons with external organizations. As part of its responsibilities, it will coordinate with AECC working groups for specific activities and collaboration between AECC and 3GPP.

www.aecc.org