Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1219491
April/May/June 2020 I 31 FIGURE 4: Enabling mainstream autonomous vehicles may require thousands of sensors monitoring and reacting to every aspect of the surrounding environment requiring instantaneous processing and feedback with little or no tolerable latency. Another ultra-low latency application of interest is autonomous vehicles. As they become more mainstream, there will ultimately be thousands of self-driving vehicles in a given town or city that must provide awareness of other cars, detection of bikes, animals, and people to avoid accidents while human occupants have their noses buried in their devices making that all important text, reading road conditions, traffic prompters, and changing condi - tions, as well as paying attention to operational and sys- tem failure mechanical monitoring (Figure 4). Due to the vast number of sensors and processors, some people may envision the need for thousands of EDCs in the form of prefabricated MDCs located a couple of blocks apart. Some members in the TIA Edge Data Center Working Group, on the other hand, do not see autonomous vehi - cles requiring a multitude of EDCs as these vehicles have on-board intelligence to make detections and decisions. They only require a centralized data center for things like maps and traffic information, which are not delay sensi- tive, since maps can be cached locally or downloaded at the beginning of a trip. For traffic lights, managing congestion, and gathering data, the municipal or local city data center or a nearby colocation facility either act- ing as an EDC or handling edge applications are sufficient and efficient for current smart city deployments. EDCS, GEOGRAPHY, AND ITS CONTINUAL EVOLUTION Much of the general data that is stored or processed today can withstand latency times between 10 ms and 100 ms, including some popular video streaming services. In this case, large scale core data centers are adequate. Core data centers are geographically dispersed and cover large regions. In many cases, there may be a path to two or more core data centers. This means that the data may go to one location, such as Ashburn, Virginia or Atlanta, Georgia, or it may make a round trip touching both or may even make multiple hops. When latency require- ments lower to around 1 ms, higher bandwidth dictates, and there may be a need to move the process function