Conducted by four members of the GLF working group, this PoC is a major breakthrough which will enable global connectivity providers to meet the requirements for critical IoT applications.
“Critical IoT traffic has a much higher set of requirements and needs to be separated from regular IoT traffic,” said Marc Halbfinger, CEO, Console Connect.
“Through close cooperation with other IPX providers, this PoC shows it is possible to reduce latency to support critical IoT traffic. Between Europe and Asia tests showed latency was reduced from a median value of 296 milliseconds to 105 milliseconds, and this is only the beginning. Through local peering and packet gateways, we believe we can further decrease latency globally.”
Such use cases include Connected cars, autonomous driving, remote surgery, smart grids and factories, patient monitoring, augmented reality for vital repairs all of which require continual connectivity, low latency, and high bandwidths.
“Vital to the success of the PoCs were the simultaneous implementation of both local gateways and local peering. In all three of the test scenarios, they were situated close to the simulated end user. This allowed a huge decrease in latency from a median value of 246 milliseconds to 128 milliseconds,” added Rolf Nafziger, SVP at Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier.
Four members of the GLF IoT working group comprised of Console Connect, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, Orange International Carriers, and Telefónica Global Solutions, collaborated to deliver this PoC.
This included three separate studies to verify viable global connectivity between Europe, the US and Asia. In these regions, packet gateways and local roaming connections between the provider networks were implemented. Artificially generated traffic was used to test mock-ups of connected cars located in the three areas.
“With local peering and a regional packet gateway, the lowest possible latency was achieved for IoT connected car use cases," said Emmanuel Rochas, CEO at Orange International Carriers.
"The decrease was phenomenal, -52% from 312 milliseconds using home routing, to 115 milliseconds with our PoC. Local breakout in the roaming environment is definitively a game changer, reducing latency and improving quality of service, making us ready for 5G massive IoT developments.”
The results confirmed an improvement in the speed of roaming connectivity with an average latency reduction of 50% in the technical tests.
The working group’s next phase of development will concentrate on creating a technical and commercial framework to ensure quality of service for international, critical IoT traffic. In addition, they will also share the results of these trials and include more service providers in the initiative.
“The PoCs have shown that it is possible to significantly lower latency and thus facilitate even the most urgent IoT applications – applications that can literally make the difference between life and death. In all PoCs, the latency was consistently reduced by about half, which is a remarkable feat," said Eloy Rodríguez, chief wholesale officer of Telefónica Global Solutions.
