Private LTE and Edge computing

If we look at it from two extremes — from the end vehicle to the production line, there are a few commonalities that pop out — that both “platforms”, irrespective of whether car or factory are being rapidly digitized, and increasingly require ubiquitous connectivity. At a fundamental level, this implies a large number of sensors connected to a network, generating increasing amounts of data — all having to be analyzed and processed to drive decision making — whether autonomous navigation in a car or a logistics robot in a production facility. This is where Private LTE and Edge computing comes in, and why — if you are in the automotive sector, it is a question of when, rather than if you embrace these capabilities.

As connectivity within facilities (and even on the road) moves beyond business driven communication needs (e.g. connected printers) to business critical (e.g. workforce automation) or even mission critical (e.g. safety) applications ,the existing infrastructure made up of WiFi or Ethernet or current mobile networks falls way short of expectations.

Enterprises these days are demanding the reliability and security of Ethernet LAN with the benefits of a wireless technology

Those operations that can survive and scale using WiFi today are not affected — but those that realize that their current connectivity options do not meet the needs of

are beginning to explore alternatives, and that is where Private LTE comes into play.

Private LTE improves business efficiency and agility with a reliable, secure and low latency wireless technology seamless positioning itself between WiFi and Ethernet LAN.

Given the best in class connectivity at your disposal, edge computing then places high-performance compute, storage and network resources as close as possible to end users and devices. Doing so lowers the cost of data transport, decreases latency, and increases locality. This enables an entirely new class of applications which were both not technically or economically feasible in the past.

In more ways than one it is a return to distributed systems — only that now, it is engineered to support a plethora of IoT devices and applications. In this context, it is also useful to understand its implication within an enterprise location — one that is being increasingly digitized from the ground up. While IT 2.0 was all around a client — server (potentially on-premise) architecture, the future points towards an AI enabled distributed infrastructure where complex event processing (CEP) happens as close to the source as possible.

This is a multi-stage issue. In the short term vehicle OEM’s need a connectivity solution to be able to offload and process this data in near (if not) real-time within the constraints of a test-track or a localized region (city etc.). This will help accelerate the testing and development effort. In the mid to long term, this would have to move beyond a test facility to cover major transportation corridors — eventually be available everywhere.

Using Wi-Fi or the public mobile network for this is not stable, secure and does not scale well commercially or technically. Using a private LTE network addresses the issues of stability with mobility, managing a network that can gather a large volume of data in real time without being charged by the megabyte/consumption, and offering a secure network with own local breakout to process the data on the premises for faster analysis.

Before embarking on the Private LTE journey OEM’s, especially those which have operations around the world are faced with many questions.

It is essential that firms do consider these questions when making their decision — else they run the risk of ending up with a complex undertaking, which may fall well short of expectations.

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