According to several recent analysis reports, connected car technology will gradually develop over the next several decades. However, for this development to occur, many issues remain to be resolved in terms of infrastructure, especially mobile network architecture.

Equinix, a global provider of digital infrastructure, announced on the 30th that it has helped TravelPing build a connected car network using Equinix Metal and Equinix Fabric, solving data sovereignty and latency issues faced by its automotive customers.

Travelping, a German company that helps companies design and operate networks built around the world, had a client, a major German automaker, who needed wireless connectivity for vehicles sold in over 40 countries, including Korea.

Accordingly, vehicles sold in Korea needed to connect to domestic data centers, but the global networks of telecommunications companies contracted with manufacturers could not meet low latency and data sovereignty requirements, which became an obstacle to connected car services in Korea.

To establish a wireless connection in Korea for the manufacturer's vehicles, Travelping used a wireless access network based on a roaming agreement with a domestic carrier, which resulted in high latency.

Due to the network architecture, which included a Packet Data Network (PDN) gateway and S8 interfaces, including a service gateway, vehicle data had to travel back and forth from Korea to Germany before reaching the local cloud data center.

As a result, the round trip distance reached 8,500 km, resulting in a delay time of 274 milliseconds, which exceeds the acceptable range of connected car network delay time.

Travelping is a bare metal cloud service that provides automated, dedicated computing infrastructure.We solved this problem by virtually deploying a PDN gateway in an Equinix data center in Korea using al.

The virtual gateway mimics the role of a physical PDN gateway, significantly reducing latency by eliminating the need for vehicle data to travel overseas before reaching the carrier's IP network.

The S8 handoff between the Korean carrier's mobile network and the German carrier's IP network was seamless, utilizing a physical cross-connect between Traveling's metal servers located within the same data center and the Korean carrier's network physical point of presence (POP) and a private link using Equinix Fabric. The resulting round-trip network latency was less than 20 milliseconds.

The network is based on Travelping's cloud-native and containerized solution, CENNSO, Cloud Enabled Network Service Operations. CENNSO includes △ virtual packet gateway △ session management function △ user plane function △ MQTT gateway, a message queue-based service.

These features optimize user data sessions, route data between mobile devices and the internet, and make telemetry data generated in cars available to automakers.

“Building a POP in Korea is time-consuming and expensive, but Travelping’s CENNSO, combined with Equinix Metal and Equinix Fabric, allows our automaker customers to offer advanced connected car technology to their Korean customers without delay,” said Holger Winkelmann, founder and CEO of Travelping. “Equinix’s global connectivity and ecosystem are the perfect solution to meet the low latency and data residency requirements of connected cars.”

“Automakers need to collect, process, integrate, and analyze vast amounts of data shared across geographic boundaries to deliver seamless driving experiences for connected cars,” said Jang Hye-deok, CEO of Equinix Korea. “Existing centralized IT infrastructure is inflexible, expensive, and difficult to integrate new capabilities.”

“Our collaboration with Traveling will enable automakers to easily set up hybrid multicloud architectures on dedicated bare metal infrastructure,” he emphasized.