ISA devices – Utilizing Public 5G Networks for Multi-Access Edge (MEC) Architectures

ISA units are devices that work very much like cruise control, except instead of limits being set by the driver, they are able to communicate with local infrastructure to modify the car’s throttle in response to road conditions. These could be things such as speed limits, upcoming traffic that the driver can’t see yet, icy roads, and so on.

The following diagram shows how an application that manages ISA devices for a given metro area can run in an AWS Wavelength Zone, while other components of the connected vehicle solution run in the parent region on managed services such as AWS IoT FleetWise.

Figure 10.10 – ISA using AWS IoT FleetWise and AWS Wavelength

Notice that the application has a CV ML model that is being informed by multispectrum cameras of the type discussed earlier in this chapter. This lets the application make safety-related inferences about road conditions – for example, it could see “black ice” on the road that the human eye cannot. In response, the application can tell all ISA-equipped vehicles in the area to lower their speed accordingly.

AWS IoT FleetWise

We’ve already covered AWS IoT Greengrass in previous chapters, but there are other components shown in the preceding diagram that we haven’t yet mentioned.

When building any connected vehicle solution, an architect must ask themselves the following questions:

How can we establish mutual trust between the vehicle and the cloud?

How can we ingest data from the car’s electronic control unit (ECU) to the cloud?

How can we cache data during periods when the signal is down?

How can we map these proprietary data structures that vary by make/model/year onto a common namespace?

How can we make sense of many millions of such data samples over time?

How can we deploy updates to vehicles in the field?

How can we discover problems before a customer does?

How can we respond quickly to individual or fleet-wide issues?

How can we securely issue commands to the vehicles for control use cases?

AWS’ portfolio of IoT services can address these foundational needs, quickly and at scale. See the Designing Next Generation Vehicle Communication with AWS IoT Core and MQTT and the AWS IoT FleetWise Developer Guide sections of the AWS documentation for detailed information on these services.