With 5G and Edge technologies, a heterogenous and complex ecosystem is already entering the automotive sector. We must soon understand the components and stakeholders for “cellular vehicle-to-everything” at a business, operational, deployment and connectivity level.  Joining this executive session about how 5G and Edge are critical for the advancement of the automotive sector and the stakeholders entering the C-V2X space are, Prabhakar Chitrapu, Ravi Puvvala, and Ravi Sinha.

Prabhakar Chitrapu – Chairman, of the Emerging Tech Group, SCF

Ravi Sinha – Co-Chair, SCF Emerging Tech Group, & Director, Jio Reliance

Ravi Puvvala– Harman, Head of Telematics Sales

Transcription Details

Time: 32:34

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SPEAKERS

Host, Ravi Sinha, Prabhakar Chitrapu, Ravi Puvvala

 

Host:

With 5G and edge technologies, a heterogeneous and complex ecosystem is already entering the automotive sector. We must soon understand the components and stakeholders for cellular vehicle to everything at a business operational deployment and connectivity level. Joining this executive session about how 5G and edge are critical for the advancement of the automotive sector, and the stakeholders entering the CV2X space are; Prabhakar Chitrapu, Ravi Puvvala, he's head of Telematic sales, at Harman. And we have Ravi Sinha, of the Small Cell Forum, and also director at Jio Reliance.

 

Gentlemen welcome to the program, thanks for being here.

 

So, let's set the stage Prabhakar if you don't mind, I'm going to start with you. Why should automakers invest in 5G and edge technologies, and what are the clear benefits there, and also, what is the difference between those 4G characteristics?

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

Thank you very much for inviting me to this panel, and that's a great question, let's start with that. Let's actually start by asking ourselves, what is it that automakers would like to offer to their customers and end-users? So, essentially, the value added would be to improve driving safety. Avoiding accidents and so on, the most important perhaps. Provide driving assistance through traffic, and road conditions, and weather conditions, and so on. And last but not least, is to provide superior infotainment services. So, these are three things that will provide additional value to the end customer. All these can be provided in a very efficient and cost-effective manner using cellular V2X technologies. The reason at a high level can be stated in a very simple way, the network can see more than a single automobile, the network can see more than a single automobile. This is clear because the network can certainly see farther than a single automobile, it can see around the corners, it can have a collective knowledge of the entire area and a group of vehicles rather than just one. So, this knowledge when processed through AI and ml kind of techniques can provide these add these value-added services. Next, the auto automakers would also like to provide these added values, while keeping the costs the same or attractive. Here again, the network-based solutions do provide an opportunity because you can actually offload some of the computing costs that go into the automobile into the network side. So, based on all these things, it is worthwhile for automakers to invest in network-based solutions to provide value-added services and to contain the costs. Next is what technologies would be the what network technologies will be the best right. Clearly, cellular technologies will have a big advantage because of economies of scale and so on. Next is 5G compared to 4G, 5G has low latency which is absolutely required and we'll go into more detail later in the session. It has broadband characteristics, very high data rates that are also required for radar applications. Another thing that is probably less appreciated is the seamless integration of non-cellular technologies. This is an integral part of 5G solutions, which was not there in the 4G solutions. Next, small cells... small cells are an integral part of the solution fabric because what small cells do is bring the network, radio network as close as possible to the automobile. So, that's how small cells come into the picture. And last, but not least, is edge computing. Edge computing is useful because you can offload the compute-intensive expensive parts in an automobile after the network, but not deep in the network but close to the automobile that is the edge. So, these are the three components, the 5G, small cells, and edge computing. All these bring unique characteristics which are not there in 4G and previous generations and so, I think this is the reason why it would be worthwhile for automakers to invest in a network-based solution, and especially 5G, small cells, and edge computing.

 

Ravi Puvvala:

Thank you, Prabhakar. Thank you for setting the stage about cellular V2X and the integration, the infrastructure of small cells. We also see a growing trend from the automaker’s perspective, that the new car Assessment Program, the end cap is helping automakers to start integrating the technology so that they can get a five-star rating for their premium vehicles, this is a growing trend around the world. We also see that 5G and cellular V2X would allow automakers to bring in the features that are more relevant for autonomous vehicles, which is why we at Haraman are very excited about bringing the CV2X technology to be a part of every 4G and 5G modem in connected cars but also playing a big role in terms of how to build infrastructure both for physical as well as virtual roadside units.

 

Ravi Sinha:

I would like to chime in a little bit or add value to what Prabhakar and Ravi said. I think it is important to understand for the world, how exactly is Small Cell Forum is adding value to what we are talking about, our automotive domains. Small Cell Forum has recently initiated a workgroup which is kind of very specifically looking forward to work into the edge infrastructure frameworks and blueprints which is very close to the domain that we are talking about now, as well as a lot of 5G and Wi-Fi convergence, which can also be a possibility of what we are talking about here, as well as some of the small cell components, which can be kind of a basic building block to what we are talking about here as well as the next generation of networks. I feel that SCF is preparing in a big way with a lot of collaborations and [unintelligible: 07:13] including our own capabilities and I can see a great future for automotive when all three prongs of the industry, automotive industry, the telco infrastructure, hyperscalers as well as the county kind of transport framework can come together and create a very unique kind of environment for the automotive industry, where anything and everything in terms of infotainment, to connectivity, to safety, is a possibility to have a great user experience is you are going to see in the coming few years down the line.

 

Host:

Ravi Puvvala, I'm going to go back to you. And again, for people out there that don't understand the topic today and to give them a little bit of more broad-brush description. Why is it important to control the latency for the connected vehicle, really regarding the radio link, roadside small cell infrastructure, and the edge computing platform? Can you offer an example or use case?

 

Ravi Puvvala:

Oh, yeah. V2X technology, as Prabhakar has mentioned, plays a big role to cover non-line-of-sight scenarios. So, this allows the vehicle manufacturers to bring data that's not inside the car but outside the vehicle. And when we bring in the information, it typically requires data to be collected and processed three seconds before a potential accident can happen, and here latency is really important. We see that V2X technology is the best mechanism to bring the lower latency and cellular V2X offers us not just from the perspective of car to car, but car to infrastructure communications.

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

I'd like to actually add to this also. What Ravi mentioned is the importance of low latency from the application point of view, the customer experience, the application point of view. They also mentioned earlier that one of the other drivers is cost reduction. So, if you're looking at an automobile, and you have all these sliders and so on collecting tons of data, and all this has to be processed in real-time for video, and analytics, and so on, it takes a lot of compute power. So, if you want to reduce this amount of compute power that has to go into the vehicles, you basically offload some of this computing to the network edge. What that means is that some of the front-end computing you do in the car, send off those results to the edge, the edge does the bulk of the heavy-duty computing and sends the results back. Now all this has to happen in real-time. So, clearly low latency, extremely low latency is important so that these computations can happen in real-time, although two different nodes are actually executing this computation.

 

Ravi Sinha:

I'd like to chime with Prabhakar a bit over here. We know that when you said offloading, what exactly are we offloading? Basically, your computer vision is a very high compute centric process and definitely any device because all our automotive kind of [unintelligible: 10:33] especially the car is based on our dongle or device with all sorts of additional bells and whistles to give you the right experience you're looking for. But when we talk about the role of computer vision, it is heavily, heavily there and it needs a lot of processing which needs your FPGAs and all. So, ultimately, I think if you can offload it, not only that in terms of resilience, the kind of support your 5G network can provide, especially with the ULC and even in future, massive IOT, which is a part of... it's a huge network inside the car. A lot of things can be very cognitively done with the help of offloading to your network infra. I feel that it's a must in the future.

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

If I may, just one more point I wanted to mention before we leave this latency topic because latency is extremely important, and in fact, 5G is almost uniquely distinguishing itself through its latency performance. When you talk about latency, I think it's very important and useful for everyone to understand what contributes to this latency. There are three fundamental components that contribute to the overall latency. One is, over the radio interface, or the radio link between the car and the radio base station. The second is, once it reaches the network edge, how far it has to go before it can actually be given up to the applications. This is the delay involved in the radio network. The third is, the delay involved in actual computing, how long it takes him to send it back. So, these are the three fundamental components of end-to-end latency and as I said before, 5G reduces the latency on the radio link, small cells reduce the latency in the radio network and edge computing reduces the latency in the computational part.

 

Ravi Puvvala:

In 5G a year, we have a new framework called predictive quality of service. So, when we look at a lot of the applications or use case scenarios for the auto industry, we are looking at leveraging the predictive quality of service to enable the use scenarios, the services scenarios, to indicate the quality of service conditions that we require the radio link and the network and I think it all ties back together to the automaker.

 

Ravi Sinha:

I think the latency we're talking about here; I think recently, we were in the lecture of a Carnegie Mellon University where they talked about that standard latency for computer vision applications, 40 milliseconds or below. That kind of requirement as Prabhakar rightly said that, unless you optimize the latency of a radio, small cell infra as well as edge for applications in processing, this is not going to happen unless the convergence happens in an optimum way, the industry can see a lot of magic here. I think this is what I would like to say.

 

Host:

Ravi, Prabhakar, I want you to go ahead and answer the next question for us and then we can go around the room on this one, I think. So, what is your message to automakers for their end consumer value proposition as the network rapidly evolves and new stakeholders enter this cellular V2X space?

 

Ravi Puvvala:

What we want to communicate with the automakers is that incremental investment to put 5G radios in their vehicles would go a long way because we believe that 5G would enable multiple revenue sources for both the consumer as well as the automaker, which they would lose out if they do not migrate to 5G fast enough. Right. We see that 5G also allows, 1000s of scenarios in terms of how to bring these applications at the lowest latency, highest throughput that we've always seen but it also enables mechanisms to freely move the computation power from the car to was the network. But if I'm an end-user, I'd really like to understand what it means to me. Why do I build a safer car? Why do I want to understand what it means for the entertainment, to the passengers in my vehicle, and so on?

 

Host:

Prabhakar, Ravi Sinha, would you like to follow up?

 

Ravi Sinha:

One very important point I would like to raise with 5G or the telco industry engagement where the very strong evolution part is a huge difference. Think about this whole CB2X started with release 14 and now we are almost there for release 16. It has really transitioned a lot in terms of the radio requirements, in terms of the overall ecosystem requirements when we transition from our specifications to our solution and packaging. I think the industry is ready, it's all about how these three or four domains or prongs of a country is aligning how the policies are made to bring all of them together. In America at least, I'm seeing some of the initiative happened between Verizon and Honda, you can see some of those where they're coming very close to each other, and then bringing the county infrastructure and trying to figure it out, even at the beginning level. Even thinking about the precision positioning of it, you need to have one-meter accuracy to the positioning of it. How exactly can you do it? When you're outside if you're in a fringe zone, how exactly do you communicate because you can control the environment? This is where the coordinated assisted driving or auto drive can give you a lot of strength in the presence of your [unintelligible: 16:43] or in the absence of it. The position can also be taken care of in a very different way, at a much precise level.

 

Host:

Ravi Sinah, I want to continue with that thought. So, as far as educating automakers, how do you educate them on really the value of investing capital into 5G connected vehicles in order to ultimately reduce their capex and opex expenses.

 

Ravi Sinha:

I would like to see a bigger picture over here, I think that providing this automotive experience to the world is not really the responsibility of automotive vendors, it is a combined effort where the infrastructure can be shared among multiple, multiple players over here, be it the automotive section, be it your telco sectors, be it your county infrastructure. I can see, like even California, multi-billion-dollar budgeting is supposed funded or given for these kinds of things. Even in Georgia, I can see a lot of activities there. So, it's all about [unintelligible: 17:49] unless we see a business case, we build a platform together, it's a multi-tenant infrastructure where all sorts of possibilities in terms of services 3are there. And then, that infrastructure and network as a service can be leveraged to bring any and every kind of service on the top, so that the revenue generator over there can be equally shared. Then it is not burdened to one section of the industry rather, it is going broader in a broader way.

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

I would probably try to address this in a slightly oblique way maybe, in the sense that the investment in terms of capex and opex and so on, it's pretty clear. But I think in terms of educating the automakers, it's probably also useful or necessary for us to educate them on the overall ecosystem, the complexity of the ecosystem, the stakeholders, and players in the ecosystem. Unless as Ravi said, all these pieces come together it's not going to be a success story. And so, I think it is important to clearly paint the stakeholder, paint ecosystem picture, clearly identify the roles, and responsibilities, and restrictions of each of these stakeholders so that the automakers will realize that, it is not just that I'm going to put more money into this and this technology, there is more work to be done. It is not necessarily as I said, [unintelligible: 19:29] it probably doesn't directly translate into those categories. But I think the more the automakers understand the overall ecosystem, the more they can work with the counties and the governments, local governments, and so on. I think it will be helpful.

 

Ravi Puvvala:

Let me try to summarize from an end-user perspective and how the automakers could educate the end-user. I want to bring an example with the state of Texas. As we all know, there are lots and lots of tolling gantries in Texas, and today, there's a lot of investment going into the infrastructure on how to enable tolling applications to the vehicle. But lots of them require a physical gantry because we do not have precise positioning service available but with the advent of 5G, edge, precise positioning services, if we can enable road user charging type of applications, the automaker can educate the consumer to say, even when you're paying a toll road, you will go a lot faster than the end-user who is not using the toll road. But in reality, what we have seen is that the user who's paying the toll road is penalized with the one that is not paying the toll road. Because we have seen these types of core complex traffic scenarios, even the person who's willing to pay the money is not able to utilize the high occupancy toll lanes. So, this a good example of how the technology comes up with fair ways on building the infrastructure where we don't have to have physical equipment, but with the advent of 5G and enabled services, we can create, assign the road authorities to build much mire gantries and allow the consumers to use the toll highways a lot easier than the regular way of doing things.

 

Host:

Ravi S, I wanted to go to you and then have Prabhakar on as well. How will the CV2X platform really be a baseline platform for future services like third-party application, safety, connectivity, infotainment, as well as smart city and traffic safety?

 

Ravi Sinha:

Great question, and I think last year also, we had a session on that. The kind of infrastructure you build, especially with 5G you're going with standard cloud-native infrastructure when we say. Ultimately it has got multiple pieces of it where Infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service brings a network as a service platform overall for the world. Now, on top of it, since this is fully virtualized, it is important that once you build a very cognitive connectivity service or connectivity layer from the telco side or a private network side, then on the top of it ultimately it all depends when in case of automated, what is missing compared to the regular kind of service launch is, the way you do service chaining for the hyperscalers and [unintelligible: 22:38] just connecting the telco network infra and on the top of it with SLI, you bring all the services from third party and [unintelligible: 22:46] But over here, I think the missing piece is the play of the county or the government sector; how exactly the hazard information, how exactly the transport control information is getting integrated? Since we are bringing the metro edge or you can say, a kind of central office edge close to the to your vehicles, definitely it also provides you the opportunity to integrate not only the connectivity or services but the third piece of it which is the automotive side of it, which is your county services. And then once you connect ultimately, smart city is connected with your smart transport, they are intertwined. So, when you are moving from one place to another place through your vessels, whether it is a car or any other kind of vessel that you're talking about, ultimately you need the assisted driving but you also need to have kind of your experience when you wanted to assess the smart city services if they are aggregated or converged at a single platform. And the service piece or orchestration piece of it is taking smart decisions, and not only letting you take the decision based on the kind of mood or the requirements you have but also assisting and letting you know that by the way, the areas through which you're serving, the smart city leader, the smart city services, these are the hazard services which you can subscribe, multiple third-party applications going to it and you can see some of the applications already just based on positioning is [unintelligible: 24:31] When we talk about smart cities or services fully converged with the transport services, I think I'm seeing a lot of disruptive services are going to come. Recently when we were in Carnegie Mellon, I can also refer to you that there was one example where when you're going in a car when your cameras are on, you can not only see the traffic but you can also see the quality of the road, any kind of hazardous conditions, potholes and all. So, along with coordination in automotive, you're also feeding it back to the nodes and letting the customer, letting all the users know the kind of driving experience you're going to have further. So, there are a lot of disruptive services you can bring in a stitch at a very common [unintelligible: 25:5] you have whether it is at a macro level, metro level, or whether it is in the central office level, and that is only possible with 5G. Before 5G, technologies were very much stuck with the kind of framework you had. Over here, this is a factory where anything and everything is possible in terms of services for automotive.

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

What I would like to add to this is, the question being... let us say we have a CV2Z platform in place, how could this be leveraged for smart city applications for example, so that the value is further enhanced? So, if you just step back and think about what does the CV2X platform consist of right? You have the roadside units which provide connectivity to the vehicles, then you got the small cells that provide connectivity to the core networks and to the internet, then you have the network to the traffic management systems which are local metro level networks, and then edge computing, for doing artificial intelligence, ml processing for video, analytics, etc. So, these are the four components of a CV2X platform, if you will. Now, once you have this in place, now you look at what a smart city would like to do in terms of applications? So, you can think of, for example, pollution control, traffic control, crowd control, security, emergency services, warning services. So, for all these things, you simply can use the existing CV2X platform to just add on these services. For example, security or crowd control, you already have the video processing artificial intelligence capabilities right there, so it's a short step in my opinion to take the CV2X platform, and adapt it and enhance it for smart cities. applications.

 

Ravi Puvvala:

Thank you, Prabhakar. It is the reason why we at Haraman are really focusing on virtual roadside units because by providing the solution to the mobile operators, we can bring the data from every intersection, whether it is traffic controllers, pedestrian detection, video processing of the data, into the edge on the cloud so that we can provide as a service to the end consumer or the automaker. We know by working with the small cell forum, we can propagate the physical rollout of the roadside units, either pre-integrated with small cells or a standalone platform, but this virtual RSU platform will really enable the third-party applications. The other thing that is a worry for the automakers is to understand what kind of implications it has when they have to have their drivers roam from one country to the other country. An example would be a driver driving from Detroit to Toronto. How does the service that is being offered by the automakers be instantiated by different operators? So, we have a multi-operator type of environment, we also have the state and [unintelligible: 28:52] to interact with the operator’s infrastructure, which is why we see the CV2X as a good platform for all these ecosystem players, whether you're a power operator, or a road operator, or a mobile operator, to coexist and instantiate your services on a multi-homing platform.

 

Prabhakar Chitrapu:

In fact, I just would like to pick up on that. Thank you for mentioning the work that small cell forum is doing. We have a group dedicated to looking at emerging technologies and CV2X is one of them. The opportunity we see here is that small cells, which are typically deployed for providing coverage and capacity, now in the CV2X context can also provide services. There are two ways to look at edge computing and the radio network right, so the edge computing can be at some location, and the radio network will simply provide connectivity. But in the CV2X because of the latencies. We talked about, edge computing has to come to the small cells, has to be incorporated and integrated into the small cells. Now, obviously, this means it cannot be heavyweight, it has to be lightweight edge computing. So, there is a great opportunity here for the small cell vendor ecosystem to actually... how would you enhance small cells to serve CV2xapplications and to so smart city applications? And so, that is something that the forum is looking at but also, we recognize that for the reasons we mentioned before, it is a complex ecosystem with multiple stakeholders. So, many times, what we find is that when multiple stakeholders are involved, establishing a common language is the first challenge, so we spend a lot of time trying to reach out to the stakeholders, but also write white papers and so on that clarify in a common language, the ecosystem, the roles and responsibilities, the opportunities and challenges to different stakeholders. And of course, in addition to that, in particular, we see an opportunity for small cells to be enhanced with edge computing capabilities to serve CV2Xand smart city applications.

 

Host:

In our pre-session conference call, there was a comment made that the network can see more than the car can see., and I feel like that's what CV2X, or just V2X, is all about. It's the fact that the infrastructure of the network can see what's around the corner faster and better and quicker than what the actual physical vehicle can see. So, it's all interesting stuff and it's great that we were able to pull this session together at the last minute as part of the larger telco edge cloud event today. We appreciate everyone's time and being here. And by the way, Ravi and Prabhakar, we will display your full titles when we announce your name at the top of the show so it will more specific, to make sure that we identify you more properly. Ravi Puvvala, I wanted to thank him in particular because we all wouldn't be here today having this discussion if it wasn't for his involvement, and Haraman’s involvement and their team as well, so we appreciate that. And again, to all of our viewers out there, we thank the speakers on V2X and small cells for this executive session on-demand on April 26. Go to thenetworkmediagroup.com. So long.