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Smart factories The retail edge Cities come online

> Manufacturing efficiencies > Competing with the Internet > Connecting existing
could be unlocked with IoT giants means bringing the conurbations might be harder
systems and intelligent plants Internet into the store than we thought
apc.com/edge

Contents
4 M
 anufacturing Edge: Are we
there yet?
Factories of the future will
combine AI, IoT, and 5G
6 G
 aining an Edge against
bloodsuckers:
Using a Raspberry Pi-based
Smart Mosquito Zapper
8 A
 dvertorial:
Can the Edge deliver on its full
promise?
10 V
 ehicle to vehicle:
Driving the transport Edge
Key technologies in the next
mobile revolution
12 B
 rick and digital mortar
In the retail revolution, Edge
could help the traditionalists
14 S
 o you want to build
a smart city?
To become intelligent, cities
must integrate Edge, and Cloud
10
12
You keep using that word...
M
andy Patinkin
in cult movie
The Princess
Bride, said:
"You keep using
that word.
I do not think it means what you
think it means." He could have been
addressing the confusion and hype
around Edge computing.
We firmly believe that Edge is
coming. But what exactly will it
be? This supplement aims to show,
not tell - by looking at the practical
implementation of some of the
leading Edge use cases.
Manufacturing
Will Edge carry out all the tasks
of a future factory? Not exactly,
but it will be implicated in all of
them. So AI will be developed and
trained in the Cloud, but delivered
with lightweight, agile, Edge IoT
equipment (p4).
Miss this nuance, and you may
lose the point. Some hardware only
does a certain job. If the hype leads
you to expect the world, you may
end up sorely disappointed.
The healthcare Edge
You might expect a piece on
healthcare Edge to feature a visit to
an ultra-modern hospital. Instead,
we looked at how Edge technology
can respond to a persistent killer in
the developing world.
Sorely needed in Taiwan and
elsewhere, the Smart Mosquito
Zapper is an affordable Edge
device which works with the
cloud to identify mosquitoes and
determines what illness they are
preparing to spread - helping to
save lives from dengue fever and
14
Japanese encephalitis, as well as
malaria (p6).
Edge Supplement
Sponsored by
Smart transport
DCD was never that convinced
about predictions for the take-up
of autonomous vehicles. After
an initial acceleration, the sector
has slowed to a crawl, thanks to
accidents and the fundamental
difficulty of the problem.
Will vehicle-to-vehicle
technology be a more realistic take
on the transport Edge? There's a
strong set of technologies, lower
barriers to their adoption, and
plenty of pilot projects (p10)
Retail
Mourn the loss of traditional retail
models, and you might be shedding
a tear too soon. It seems like the
Edge might be the way traditional
brick-and-mortar businesses can
integrate with the efficiency of
online (p12).
Your trip to the mall will be a
simultaneous virtual visit to an
online wonderland, letting you
browse the unlimited choices of an
online store, using your real-world
senses. Can we have the best of
both worlds?
Smart city
Unnecessary technology and
inappropriate goals blighted the
first efforts to make smart cities,
using embedded sensors and
old-school 3G networks and public
WiFi. Now 5G has re-opened the
possibility of actually delivering an
integrated environment where the
Edge can work with the cloud (p14).
Loss of control is the danger
this time, if city authorities cede
too much control to the cloud
giants. However, with enough
careful planning, the tools and the
opportunities are really there to
build urban Utopias with Edge.
Edge Supplement 3
The manufacturing Edge:
are we there yet?
We have heard that hyperconnected, AI-driven factories of the future
will require tons of compute, storage and networking. This vision is slow
Max Smolaks
to turn to reality, Max Smolaks reports Contributor

The adventures of Dub Dub

To demonstrate all the potential benefits of AI
in manufacturing, Deloitte built an unusual
project: a virtual rubber duck factory.
At first sight, the installation that tours
industry events like AWS Re:Invent and the AI
Summit looks like a funky carpet. But point a
smartphone camera, and through the magic
of augmented reality you will find yourself
in the middle of a busy production line,
complete with detailed metrics on things like
productivity, downtime, maintenance and
the rate of defects.
Why rubber ducks? That’s all due to
Dub Dub, the ‘Daring
Disruptor Duck’ created
by AR and VR specialist
Bully Entertainment as
something of a mascot for
Deloitte’s smart factory
project. And of course,
Dub Dub has its own, AR-
enabled comic book.
The duck factory is also
available as a smartphone
app, although it doesn’t
come with the funky
carpet - users will have to
download and print out a
‘target image’ to anchor Dub Dub to reality.

4 DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com


S
mart factories are a major talking
point for technology vendors.
Rarely do you find a concept that
brings together all the buzzworthy
trends of the past decade,
including Edge computing, the
Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI),
and even 5G.
The Edge crowd likes to talk about the need
to process data locally; the IoT community
goes on about collaborative robotics and the
need for networked sensors to monitor and
measure; meanwhile, AI enthusiasts wax
lyrical about predictive maintenance and
using computer vision to conduct optical
inspections of the goods.
Some experts have suggested that
manufacturing facilities will need sizeable
'Edge' IT deployments to enable all this
functionality – but is this a case of wishful
thinking? Or will factories of the future simply
send all their data to the cloud?
Robert Schmid, chief futurist at Deloitte
Consulting, told DCD that many factories have
squeezed all the efficiency they could from
existing methodologies and management
product: “We help give customers visibility
across the factory floor, and then see where
new efficiencies can be gained.”
Embracing the new
Deloitte has identified seven use cases for
emerging technologies that can be seen
as ingredients for a smart factory, which it
showcased in its Virtual Duck Factory project
– an interactive demonstration of real-time
problem solving, based on augmented reality
tech (see box).
It won’t surprise you to find out that several
of them relied on AI. But will this new tech
mean more demand for Edge computing?
Coming up with the answer is hard, and here’s
why: most AI workloads can be separated into
two distinct stages, training and inference.
Training is the difficult part, requiring a
sizeable quantity of correctly labeled data and
tons of compute in order to create a machine
learning model that can identify certain
patterns without being explicitly programmed
to do so.
For example, show a machine thousands
of images of oranges, and it work out rules
to recognize an orange - on an image it has
never seen before. You don’t have to specify
the shape or the color; the model will learn by
observation, just like humans do.
Training demands powerful processors,
whether they are CPUs, GPUs or any of
the more recent types of silicon designed
specifically for the purpose. Andrew Ng, one
of the deep learning pioneers and former chief
scientist at Baidu, revealed that training the
company’s Chinese speech recognition model
required just four terabytes of training data,
but a whopping 20 exaflops of compute.
Inference, however, is easy: in this process,
Edge Supplement | Factories of the Future
take those rules, and put them on a simple
platform. Give it new data and it makes a
simple judgment: in our case, it’s ‘orange/not
orange.’ Inference workloads are optimized
for performance and are perfectly suitable for
execution on the under-powered hardware
of a smartwatch, a smart camera, or a smart
speaker.
It follows that equipment in smart factories
are doing a ton of inference, but they won’t
really deal with training. That will most likely
be carried out in the cloud, where resources
are cheap, and available on a pay-as-you-go
basis.
“Often, you can contain what happens
within the factory on the Edge computing
"Many of the hardware
manufacturers have
realized that... Edge
computing is really the
new frontier"
device. You don’t have to necessarily connect
to the cloud, and many manufacturers
actually appreciate that. You will find that
factory environments often don't even have
the outward bandwidth to deal with the data
volume, so they want to keep it within the
factory,” Schmid said.
“But the moment you want to do
significant machine learning [training], then
you need the cloud. When you want to learn
between factories, you do need the cloud for
that. It’s just not cost-effective for people to
buy the compute power that’s needed for the
few times that they train models.”
The hardware question
In order to deliver on the promises of AI
and IoT, smart factories will need a reliable
network and some on-premises compute.
The problem is the manufacturers aren’t
standardizing on traditional IT equipment like
the telecommunications industry did.
Back in the day, telcos relied on
proprietary, specialized and often expensive
hardware. In the past five years or so, the
industry embraced the benefits of virtualizing
the hardware functions and running them on
top of commodity servers, and cloud software.
This created a welcome source of revenue for
traditional data center vendors.
But it doesn’t look like the manufacturing
industry is moving in the same direction;
instead of familiar 19-inch pizza boxes, we’ve
seen an explosion of ruggedized form-factors
equipped with exotic connectivity options. It
might be x86 equipment inside, but it comes
in all shapes and sizes, and is very far removed
from a traditional server closet.
“Many of the hardware manufacturers have
realized that data center build-outs are not
worth selling to the corporations anymore,
many corporations are going to the cloud.
For them, Edge computing is really the new
frontier,” Schmid said.
He highlighted research by IDC suggesting
that by 2022, more than 40 percent of
organizations’ cloud deployments will involve
an element of Edge computing. While cloud
vendors are indeed cannibalizing on-
premises data centers, they are unlikely to
make a play for the actual edge of the network.
“When I think of Edge computing, and
the way we talk about it, it’s not just smaller
servers anymore; we have Edge computing
in sensors, we have Edge computing in
networking gateways; we are getting to the
point where we have so much compute
around us – and it’s all Edge!”
That familiar feeling
It turns out that when deploying a smart
factory, you can run into the same issues that
you’ve seen in a corporate data center.
“My team brings together both IT and OT
people,” Schmid said. “For example, we have
a factory up in Chicago that manufactures
packaging materials. First, we have to have IT
folks come in and install Edge computers on
the factory floor. And they need to upgrade
the network.
“Operational technology folks also have
a big part in this, because we have a lot of
primary sensors on the machines today,
but we often need secondary sensors, new
connectivity, and to connect in new ways that
we haven’t seen before. Machine-to-machine
has been around for a long time; all the OT
guys are looking at us and smiling, because
they have done this for a while.
“It’s not so much of a technical challenge,
much more of a human challenge, having
these teams work together for the first time
across the IT/OT divide.”
In a nutshell, we’ve got the applications
to make a factory smart, and infrastructure
deployment isn’t an issue; what’s missing
is the common infrastructure model to
support smart factories, the way the new
telco infrastructure model enables innovative
services in an age when its traditional voice
and messaging services are no longer making
any money.
The duck factory proves just how useful
such a common model could be. Smart
factories are coming. They are just taking their
time to get here.
“I stopped talking about IoT and artificial
intelligence, and network edge, and sensors; I
would much rather talk about smart factories.
Because you need all these components for
many of the different use cases. All of these
are enabling technologies that allow us to get
to the smart factory,” Schmid said.
Edge Supplement 5
Gaining the Edge in
the fight against
bloodsuckers
They want to drink your blood. They happen to give you diseases. The challenge is
knowing where they live. Sebastian Moss reports on efforts to use Edge computing to
combat mosquitoes
I
n swampy fields and stagnant pools,
the small eggs hatch. Out crawl tiny,
wriggling larvae, Once fully formed,
these hungry bloodsuckers will spread
out, hunting for warm bodies, and
often gift them with diseases.
Man has fought mosquitoes for millennia.
Efforts to ward off the creatures have mostly
proved ineffective, with billions of humans
perishing over the years.
In the late 1800s, when the French tried
to dig the Panama Canal, 22,000 died at
the hands of mosquito-borne Yellow Fever.
Two decades of toil amounted to naught as
the deaths sapped the will and ability of the
6 DCD Magazine • datacenterdynamics.com
workers and government.
In 1904, the US took over the project, and
the path to a successful dig was clear: Kill all
the mosquitoes.
US Chief Sanitary Officer Dr. William
Gorgas embarked on an unprecedented
effort to carry out biological warfare at an
immense scale, deploying 4,000 troops in
‘mosquito brigades’ that used 120 tons of
pyrethrum insecticide powder, 300 tons
of sulfur, and 600,000 gallons of oil. Every
house was sprayed, mesh was wrapped
around windows and doors, and all the
standing pools of water they came across
were filled.
Sebastian Moss
Deputy Editor
It worked, with Yellow Fever vanquished
in the region within two years. Less than a
decade later, the 82km (51 mile) waterway
was complete, fundamentally reshaping
global trade.
But, while lessons can be learned from the
success of the Panama Canal effort, it’s not
realistic to continue the approach. It caused
huge environmental damage, killing many
other animals and was also prohibitively
expensive - in today’s dollars, each mosquito
killed cost $240.
Today, efforts to kill mosquitoes are
more targeted. Rather than a mass war that
obliterates regions, targeted strikes seek to

eliminate hot spots, genetic modification
aims to introduce sterility, and vaccines look
to blunt the impact of spread diseases.
But to do all that requires a deep
understanding of where the mosquitoes
live, how many of them there are, and what
species they are. All of which requires data.
Two common mosquito types that
plague Taiwan are the Aedes and Culex.
The former spreads dengue, the latter
Japanese Encephalitis - but the distribution
of each across the island nation is unclear,
hampering efforts to fight the flying killers.
The common tactic for studying
mosquitoes requires hands-on work in the
field - exposing humans to risk, in a highly
inefficient and ineffective approach. That
could change, however, with the help of
Edge computing.
“The main idea was to have a system
which could give us some kind of results in
a particular area, what kind of species more
prominent, so we could we find which one
to target,” Dr. Sachit Mahajan, who worked
on the Smart Mosquito Zapper (SMZ) with
Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said.
Now a research associate at the
University of Cambridge's Department of
Sociology, Mahajan explained the project
to DCD: An Edge computing device that
would attract mosquitoes, identify them
using machine learning, and upload all the
information to a cloud data center.
To be deployable at scale, the SMZ had
to be cost-effective - built simply with
a Raspberry Pi 3 model B with
a Sony IMX219 camera, a
mosquito lamp, and a
wind concentration
390
component leading
into a photography
passage. The width
of the passage was
designed and 3D
printed to match
million
the focal length of people per year are infected
the camera. with mosquito-related
Once the insect
is in the SMZ, viruses around
the camera takes the world
several photographs,
which are converted
into grayscale to increase
computing speed. Then the
background is subtracted and, if an
object remains, the data is sent to the data
center for the harder processing.
Back in the data center, the image is
converted into a binary image and noise
is filtered out. A 350-by-350-pixel image
of the mosquito is made, which is sent
to a convolutional neural network (CNN)
designed to work out the species.
Other approaches have relied on DNA
barcoding to define a species, something
that is completely accurate, but prohibitively
Edge Supplement | Fighting Mosquitoes
expensive and slow. Another method was
to track the wing frequency, which differs
between mosquitoes - an affordable tactic,
but with only an 89.55 percent accuracy.
For their CNN, the team wanted to
beat that level. First they manually entered
pictures of the different mosquitoes in
the tunnel, with 114 Aedes and 129 Culex
samples photographed in laboratory
conditions. Once trained, the CNN was
unleashed on field samples. “It's not as easy
to have an accurate system in the field,”
Mahajan said.
"Such a system could
be used with people
who are working in the
environmental agencies
or policymaking"
As a CNN - trained on an Intel i7-8700k
and an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti - the accuracy
improves as more data comes in. “Initially,
the classification accuracy was a little bit
low, we just didn't have enough training data
that time,” Mahajan said. “But over [the three
months of] the experiment, the accuracy
increased beyond 90 percent.”
The SMZs, out alone in the wild
swampy farmlands near Taipei
City, quickly began to attract
mosquito after mosquito
- and then found
different creatures
crawling in. “It could
be that in the future
that we would
train it for multiple
species instead of
just two.”
The hope is
that the data from
the experiment, and
its follow-ups, will
make our fight against
malaria just that little bit
smarter, that little bit easier.
“Such a system could be used
with people who are working in the
environmental agencies or policymaking,
especially, when they are dealing with what
to do with the agricultural area like deciding
what kind of insecticides or pesticides
to be used or supplied to the farmers or
agricultural agencies,” Mahajan said.
The next time mankind embarks on
a massive construction project through
mosquito riddled lands, or simply tries to live
next to still bodies of water, it might just look
for salvation at the Edge.
Controlling outbreaks
Should efforts to kill mosquitoes fail,
Edge computing can still be used to
help detect and prevent mosquito borne
diseases (MBDs).
In a paper for the department of
computer science and engineering
of India's Guru Nanak Dev University,
researchers Sandeep Sood and Isha
Mahajan envision a system of IoT
sensors, cloud computing, and Edge
compute nodes.
"This system can be utilized to
distinguish and identify mosquito bitten
infected users and generates real time
notifications to prevent the outbreak of
MBDs," the paper states.
IoT devices could be used to run the
rapid and multiple tests to check for
symptoms such as fevers, skin rashes,
joint pain, and more. The data from
those machines would then be processed
on Edge systems, perhaps located within
hospitals and other medical facilities.
The next layer would be cloud
computing, where data centers would
process data that requires more power
than the Edge can handle, and for
tracking broader trends across regions,
as well as general data storage.
"The aim of [the] cloud storage
component is to store information
associated to classified category of
infected users, personal or social contact
information of each user and location of
mosquito dense and breeding sites," the
paper explains.
"It comprises of vast amounts of
storage to store analysis results, medical
information of each user in order to
share it securely among authorized
users, medical staff, pharmacies,
hospitals, healthcare professionals and
government agencies."
Such efforts could reduce the time
taken to diagnose those infected and,
crucially, help with coordinating relief
efforts and predicting where the diseases
could spread to.
Similar work is underway in Malaysia,
where the Artificial Intelligence in
Medical Epidemiology (AIME) system
tracks cases of dengue. It analyzes
these alerts, combining it with data
from variables including local terrain
and elevation to roofing types,
thunderstorms, water accumulation, and
population density.
AIME uses this information, crunched
in a machine learning program, to
predict when outbreaks are likely to
occur, within a 400m radius. The system
had an accuracy of 81-84 percent for
outbreaks three months in advance.
An Edge Supplement 7
Micro Data Centers: The
Technology Behind the
Digital Experience
Jean-Baptiste Plagne, VP of Edge Solution Offer Creation,
Secure Power Division, Schneider Electric, talks Edge
I
Most businesses today pursue
digital transformation with the goal
of making their businesses more
efficient, innovative and profitable.
Many use edge computing
technology to drive this change.
According to the research firm Market
Research Engine, companies will be
spending more than $650 billion per year on
digital transformation efforts by 2024.
As digital transformation takes root,
business models are emerging that can
make even simple grocery home delivery a
more profitable proposition. One company,
for example, has recently built state-of-
the art “smart” warehouses in order to
attain affordable high-scale home grocery
delivery. These warehouses, which are the
size of several football fields, can process up
to 65,000 orders per week.
The robots that operate within the
warehouses communicate using 4G
technology, and their control systems
are similar to those deployed in traffic
control environments (so the robots, very
rarely, if ever, crash into one another). The
IT systems that work behind the scenes
supporting the local processing needs of
these smart warehouses are specifically
designed to capture and analyze data with
very little human involvement. These
solutions package racks housing servers,
routers and other IT and communications
devices, Uninterruptible Power Supplies
(UPS), security devices and, in some cases,
cooling and environmental control units.
Combined, these components offer a secure
"Although the concept
of a micro data center is
intuitive, the successful
ordering, configuration,
delivery, installation and
support of these systems
involves complex
coordination between
multiple vendors and
suppliers"
h er e t o
ck v
i
iew
Cl
Edge Computing
requires the Certainty
of EcoStruxure Micro
Data Center
Jean-Baptiste
Plagne
Schneider
Electric
solution that can be remotely monitored
and supported.
New digitization use cases being invented
every day
Digital transformation relies on a base of
secondary technologies and services (like
the service of networking connectivity
and resilience, or the service of a stable,
uninterrupted supply of power) that the
public rarely sees. In many cases, these
components and services are buried within
enclosures that house what are now known
as micro data centers.
Consider the example of a chain of 24-
hour grocery stores. An amazing amount
of behind-the-scenes edge computing
technology is what really makes these stores
work. That technology includes point of
sales terminals, lighting systems, camera
security systems, lottery machines, credit
card transaction systems, automated self-
serve gas pumping systems, refrigeration
systems, and IT and networking systems
to name a few. All of these systems have to
work simultaneously in order for each store
to turn a profit. Systems uptime becomes
a critical element for keeping customers
either at the pumps or in the store. In
such an environment, interruptions to
power systems are extremely disruptive to
business.
Besides maintaining uptime, the micro
data centers that manage all of these in-
store operations must also be physically
secure. If servers in the IT racks are
handling customer credit card payments,
provisions have to be enforced as to who
goes into the room, and who has access to
those IT systems.
If that is difficult to achieve, those
systems need to be placed in a secure
enclosure that can be monitored remotely.
In this case, the micro data center approach,

in addition to providing rack-based security,
also improves uptime by diminishing the
possibility of human error (which is quite
common in convenience store locations
where untrained cashiers tend to perform
multiple duties).
Advantages of micro data centers
Micro data centers are small preassembled,
pre-tested and integrated solutions that are
configured into an enclosure. The racks,
power distribution units, uninterruptible
power supplies (UPS) and management
software are ready to operate before
they ever arrive at the end user location.
Since the core elements of the system
already all work together, end users
in edge environments, most of whom
are unfamiliar with the workings of IT,
have peace of mind knowing that these
systems are capable of operating on their
own, without any local support required.
Additional security devices, such as racks
with card key access and server room
security cameras, could easily be added to
the micro data center configuration.
Businesses invest in micro data centers
for multiple reasons:
1. Reduction of the IT footprint –
Converged IT helps to reduce the
footprint required to support most
edge locations by as much as 50%. This
reduction also carries over to the UPS
systems that power protect the micro
data center.
2. Improved total cost of ownership - The
investment in new lithium ion-based
UPS systems lengthens product life
and reduces man hours and costs
related to servicing the older installed
base of lead acid batteries.
3. Increased visibility – In order to more
efficiently manage and update their
install base, some micro data center
vendors offer analytics software and
Service Bureau support. The Service
Bureaus consist of teams of technology
experts who remotely monitor live
edge computing installations, for
organizations that lack the staff to do
so.
Micro data centers are available across a
wide range of form factors (from 6U up to
48U), and the 6U version is small enough
to be mounted to a wall. This particular
model is specifically designed to address
user environments where floor space is at a
premium and where low cost makes them
now feasible to deploy.
Not all wall-mount versions available in
the marketplace are alike, however. Some
of the better designs are capable of housing
power protection, communications and
hyperconverged computing.
Such hyperconverged systems can run
Advertorial | Schneider Electric
up to 50 applications if you need them to, all a global organization wants a similar
from one wall-mounted box. customer experience in Chicago, Tel
Aviv, and Beijing, then the micro data
Factors to consider when investing in center vendor’s supply chain has to
micro data centers be capable of supporting consistency
Although the concept of a micro data in technology rollouts. This ability
center is intuitive, the successful ordering, to deliver a consistent offering
configuration, delivery, installation across geographies reduces end user
and support of these systems involves support and management costs while
complex behind-the-scenes coordination boosting uptime through fast problem
between multiple vendors and suppliers. resolution.
For organizations considering roll outs of • The availability of shock packaging – A
these technologies, a complete end-to- quality integration of the various micro
end solution is often required in order to data center parts and pieces, along
simplify the process of deployment. with “shock” packaging that avoids
For vendor offerings to be complete the dislodging of components during
and for end users to experience minimal delivery, means that users avoid “dead
disruption, the following micro data center- on arrival” situations.
related capabilities should be demonstrated: • The delivery of pre-certified
• Ability to withstand harsh solutions - Make sure that the various
environments – In edge computing components being delivered as part of
environments, air can be laced with the solution are pre-certified so that
impurities such as dust or chemicals, costly situations involving local on-site
temperatures can run into the extreme, certification are avoided.
and the area can be subjected to
vibration and close human contact.
In order to accommodate such
environments, ruggedized versions of To learn more about how new edge
micro data centers should be available. computing sites and micro data centers
• Remote trouble-shooting and can be easily and cost effectively
monitoring capabilities - Remote managed, download the newly released
monitoring enables a systems Buyer’s Guide to Edge Infrastructure
manager to visualize where each Management Solutions.
micro data center asset is located.
The tools allow the administrator to
determine the specific configuration
of each asset and to view detailed
messages concerning system health.
In some cases, if a problem is detected,
the system will recommend a course
of action and generate service tickets
for a local third-party managed service
provider (MSP).
• A tight and experienced network of
partners – Networks of managed
service providers, systems integrators,
distribution networks and local parts
stock depots should be available
on a global level in order to quickly
assemble and commission micro data
center solutions across regions.
• An ability to roll out consistent look
and feel of systems across the globe - If
Schneider Electric
Contact Details
Jean-Baptiste Plagne
jean-baptiste.plagne@se.com
A
utonomous vehicles have
played a big role during the
extended hype for Edge
computing. How can trucks
and automobiles be trusted
to drive themselves, without
access to accurate and reliable low-latency
information about their surroundings?
On the face of it, this is obvious enough.
It’s easy to imagine a car on a poorly lit street
plowing into a pedestrian because Internet
image processing servers can’t return the
analysis of its visual field quickly enough for
it to take evasive action.
In fact, the vehicles will need to respond
so swiftly that a lot of autonomous vehicle
tasks will have to be carried out using
on-board systems, independent of the net
wherever possible.
In the last 18 months, this has seemed
somewhat academic. A test vehicle operated
by Uber Advanced technologies Group was
involved in a fatal crash, and the company
- one of the cheerleaders for autonomy -
ended all testing on public roads.
Facing actual technical problems and
10 DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com
customer skepticism, companies have dialed
it back.
In 2015, Google‘s Waymo division
has clocked up some five million miles
of autonomous driving, monitored by a
person in the cab. The company expected
it would have 20,000 cars on the streets in
2020: we’re still waiting. And despite early
promises of fully self-driving cars, Tesla
now sells its AutoPilot as a driver assistance
system, designed to help with braking and
keeping cars in lane, that might evolve into
something which can take over the driving
in future.
Even if AVs are delivered, it’s not
at all clear that consumers will accept
them - although the autonomous vehicle
community suggests this may be irrational:
A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
study (commissioned by Google) found that
even at their current level of development,
autonomous vehicles have a crash rate of
3.2 accidents per million miles, less than the
US national rate of 4.2 accidents per million
miles.
Back in 2016, when AV optimism was at
its peak, University of Michigan professor
Huei Peng promised: “Fully automated, self-
driving vehicles are considered perhaps the
best way to reduce or eliminate traffic deaths
by taking human error out of the equation.”
Now, however, public activity is quiet,
though a series of low-key announcements
have been ticking along: as we write this,
“This data may be used
to improve efficiency,
whether that be through
changing driving
habits or re-calibrating
components for
optimization”
Uber has been granted a license to return its
AVs to Californian roads, and a Nissan Leaf

Vehicle to
Vehicle: Driving
the transport
Edge
While we all wait for autonomous vehicles,
is a more useful technology already here?
navigated its own way over 230 miles in the
UK.
Regulations are evolving too: Nuro won
the rights to dispense with a manual steering
wheel for its vehicle - classified as a “delivery
robot”- which doesn’t have room for a human
occupant in any case.
But while autonomous vehicles are quiet,
there’s still a steady stream of activity behind
the scenes in a technology which AVs need
- and which seems likely to succeed whether
or not AVs ever leave the garage.
Vehicle communications will help future
cars to avoid congestion, run more smoothly,
improve road safety and reduce emissions.
There’s a set of technologies, including
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-
infrastructure (V2I) communication, gathered
under the banner of V2X (vehicle-to-
everything)
Design and manufacturing firm Flex
says such a system needs long battery
life, powerful antennas, and modular
construction to fit a variety of niches.
Vehicles will be able to share their location,
speed, and direction 10 times per second
through messages that can travel 300m and
pierce snow, rain or fog.
“Through a connected dongle, drivers can
relay seamless, real-time data to a connected
device to better understand driving and/or
vehicle behaviors,” said a Flex spokesperson.
“This data may be used to improve
efficiency, whether that be through changing
Edge Supplement | Driving the Edge
Peter Judge
Global Editor
driving habits or re-calibrating components
for optimization.”
V2X devices are usually embedded in
vehicles and road furniture, and software can
run on existing mobile devices or embedded
technology - or even on the cloud. The data
used by these systems will be kept local when
needed and backued up to the cloud.
It seems clear that V2X technology is
coming onto our roads, and will generate a
certain amount of the Edge capacity demand
that was predicted for autonomous vehicles.
V2X is generally less controversial than
autonomous vehicles, and usually has a
clearly defined purpose with measurable
benefits. It’s also indifferent to whether the
vehicles it augments are driven by humans or
machines.
V2X should be able to deliver a lot of
the safety benefits originally claimed for
autonomous vehicles.
“Connectivity enables smart decisions
by individual drivers, by self-driving
vehicles, and at every level of automation in
between,” according to professor Peng. “It can
transform a group of independent vehicles
sharing a road into a cohesive traffic system
that can exchange critical information about
road and traffic conditions in real time.”
If one vehicle slips on ice in fog or thick
snow, all the following drivers, whether
human or automaton, will know to slow
down before they see a problem: “A potential
100-car pileup could become a two-car
fender-bender, or be avoided altogether.”
Flavors of V2X
It’s not autonomous driving as we know it,
but here are some of the ways vehicles are
getting smarter and more connected.
Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB)
Sensors on the vehicle spot obstacles
and apply the brakes. Many top
selling new cars have AEB, says Peter
Shaw, CEO of vehicle safety specialist
Thatcham Research: “Preventing the
crash from happening in the first place
now must be the focus and that starts
with having AEB as standard.”
DSRC
Regulators including the US FCC
and Europe’s ETSI have allocated
5.9GHz radio spectrum for “intelligent
transportation systems” (ITS) based on
dedicated short range communication
(DSRC). It's already used for road pricing
and collecting tolls.
Emergency V2V signaling
Which direction is that siren coming
from? Systems in development will
signal the location and travel of
emergency vehicles - and in future, also
turn traffic lights green for them.
Platooning
Cooperative adaptive cruise control
(CACC) coordinates the speed and travel
of vehicles, reducing drag and saving
fuel. Platooning is being tested by Volvo,
Daimler, and Tesla in the US.
Traffic Lights
1,600 locations in the US are testing
traffic lights which communicate on the
cellular network to tell drivers how long
they have to wait, avoiding the temptation
to drive dangerously.
Pedestrians
Vehicle to pedestrian (V2P) technology
could link vehicles with smartphones, to
tell cars where pedestrians are.
Bikes
Cyclists can be unpredictable, and hard
to see in a vehicle’s blind spot. Bikes
could carry a beacon for V2B comms,
but cyclists are not instantly keen.
Data from CopperHorse.co.uk
Edge Supplement 11
N
ew technologies are set
to change our age-old
shopping habits. But
paradoxically, the latest
innovations may be helping
to save our old-fashioned
retail outlets.
We have heard that shops are
disappearing, but according to a 2017 census,
90 percent of all retail purchases in America
were made in physical stores. More recently,
statistics in 2019 show US retailers were
opening more stores than closing.
So if shops aren’t dying then why the
fear? According to Statista, e-commerce was
responsible for around $2.3 trillion in 2017. By
2021 it is expected to hit $4.5 trillion. In the
US alone, digital shopping represents almost
10 percent of retail sales and that number is
expected to grow.
The sector’s rise can seem inexorable, but
the Edge provides an ace up the sleeve of the
brick and mortar retailers in a bid for stores to
keep their dominant market share.
It can be agreed that one big advantage
physical store fronts have is the shopping
experience. The interactions and ease of
shopping can determine whether a shop can
attract and retain visitors.
Potentially, Edge applications are the
next step in evolution for shops bringing
better, faster digital applications into the
retail sector. Imagine a gadget or a futuristic
concept of a store, and it will doubtlessly
12 DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com
involve Edge.
As you will have read elsewhere in this
supplement, Edge places compute resources,
possibly in a “micro data center” chassis,
close to users to cut down latency and make
applications responsive.
Edge resources in brick and mortar
shops could let them pair the experience of
e-commerce with physical interactions - and
then some.
Many of the tools that someone would use
for online shopping could theoretically be
implemented in physical high street stores or
mall shops. Such methods could be as simple
as customized recommendations based on
your purchase history or even buying while
you are browsing - effectively eliminating
checkout lines.
A roaming virtual assistant could run you
through a product's history. A store could
allow customers to create an account and use
their phone to log in to a customer account
unlocking the full experience.
The reality is still emerging, but we
assume “old school” customers would still
be able to use the store without the need for
any of these Edge applications. Perhaps this
customer is concerned about personal data
and prefers not to deposit pages of history
and payment details at the shop’s online
counterpart. All of this already has a fancy
name, Retail-as-a-Service (RaaS).
Steen Graham, the general manager of
Intel’s IoT Ecosystem, speaking at Advantech
in Taiwan, said: “We are limited to the
speed of light. And if we're doing real-time
applications and we have trusted applications
like autonomous cars we cannot afford any
latency."
But some retailers are building
infrastructure with this in mind. They hope to
eliminate checkout lines, manage inventory
in near real-time, and deliver seamless and
compelling services like the ability to change,
digitally, the color of an outfit that you're
trying on in a magic mirror.
“If your competition does that and you
don't do that. Maybe 10, 20 years from now,
you're probably going to be out of business.”
What Graham is talking about isn't a literal
The obstacle is that most
commercial zones in a
city or town have, since
they emerged, never
been designed to work
in parallel with such
technology at scale.
magic mirror, it's what is commonly called a
“smart mirror.”

Brick and digital
mortar
Edge applications in the retail sector promises a strong
return to form for regular brick and mortar stores, Alex
Alley reports
This is a popular example of RaaS because
of its sleek and attractive nature. In essence,
if you enter a fitting room, it will know what
exactly you brought in via IoT. The mirror
is a working touch screen and operates
like a mammoth smartphone - in China,
commerce giant Alibaba is already rolling out
a similar system in select stores.
Augmented reality is a core feature of
the system, with the camera - much like a
Snapchat filter - pasting recommendations
over a live feed of the customer.
If you bring a red T-shirt into a fitting
room, the mirror may show another item
like a pair of jeans or show you the T-shirt
colored blue. It could even show how many
items are in stock, or which are on sale,
allowing for more clothes to be sold and
“cross-sold” to the customer.
What’s more, the mirror may even take the
place of the till where an order can be placed
for the clothes and then collected upon exit.
With these “smart” fitting rooms, retailers get
all the advantages of brick and mortar retail
with those of the world of e-commerce. The
only issue is you may find a queue for the
changing rooms.
But for this technology, and similar ‘smart’
applications, the right infrastructure has to
be laid first. All of that information needs to
be processed locally and implemented on in-
store applications.
A customer would also need a seamless
connection to the shop’s network if any
Edge Supplement | Shopping Around
half-decent digital experience is to be had.
In effect, you have to bring the data center
closer to the user. In terms of retail, this could
either mean servers in the back of a store or
racks tucked away in a mall.
The challenge, however, is how would
small localized servers be able to deal with
high IT demands on such limited bandwidth.
Just because you deploy a server with a
strong Internet connection does not mean
you can run a few hundred or even several
thousand requests.
Schneider Electric’s new executive VP for
Secure Power, Pankaj Sharma, spoke to DCD
about the sheer infrastructure demands that
have to be met before Edge hits the shops.
“This is a pretty massive challenge,” he
said. “You may have a forward-looking
retailer with the foresight to improve,
rightfully, their customer experience.
“But there are challenges with that
little [Edge server] sitting in a corner.
The infrastructure required to deliver
the processing and physical computing
infrastructure is where the gap is. From that
perspective, it is rather limited.”
Sharma pointed out that companies
like Home Depot already message repeat
customers on their phone when they enter
”because they know that you're there and
they know what you buy.
“So they already have a sort of platforming
done for you, even if you're a very [standard]
consumer, and they want to send you more.“
Alex Alley
Reporter
But while that may seem pretty simple,
“to do all of that, it means a lot of computing
needs to happen in the store - which requires
a lot of computing capacity, but you also
need physical infrastructure to keep up with
that. That's the retail challenge.”
Realistically, the hardware to meet the
demands at the Edge is not even there yet.
The obstacle is that most commercial zones
in a city or town have, since they emerged,
never been designed to work in parallel with
such technology at scale.
This is why we are starting to see much
more investment from tech giants into the
retail sector. In January, American grocer
Kroger partnered with Microsoft to “reinvent
the customer experience.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft‘s CEO, explained:
“Our partnership brings together Kroger’s
world-class expertise in the grocery industry
with the power of Azure and Azure AI.
“We will redefine the shopping experience
for millions of customers at both Kroger and
other retailers around the world, setting a
new standard for innovation in the industry.”
Kroger's CEO, Rodney McMullen,
promised an "ecosystem driven by data and
technology to provide our customers with
personalized food inspiration."
But for such applications to be front and
center in a shop, that customers actually
use, we will need a whole new roll-out
of hardware and software upgrades for
shopping at the Edge.
Edge Supplement 13
So you want to
build a smart city?
Smart cities promise massive improvements in efficiency. To deliver, they will have to
intelligently combine Edge resources with the cloud. Arvin Teymouri reports
I
n concept, smart cities use a network
of sensors and devices to make
sustainability enhancements across a
city or town.
The data collected by the IoT devices
can be used to produce useful metrics
and control systems for transportation,
buildings, energy, utilities, environment, and
infrastructure, making all these systems more
efficient and intelligent.
A smart city implementation will need
to connect all the IoT devices to a control
center, which acts as the “brain” for the
networks and, by extension, the city. The
most crucial activities within a smart city are
14 DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com
managed by these control centers.
Real-time analysis of the data fed
through the system, along with statistical
reports compiled over time will allow better
inner city planning, potentially integrating
different departments and applications
within those departments.
In January, Dan Doctoroff, CEO of
Google-sister company Sidewalk Labs and
former deputy mayor of New York City,
said: “One idea we’ve put forward is adaptive
traffic signals that can recognize pedestrians,
cyclists, and transit vehicles (in addition to
cars) at intersections, helping to improve
intersection safety for all users.”
Arvin Teymouri
Correspondent
In Denmark, the city of Copenhagen
has implemented a similar solution. Traffic
lights are backed up by GPS, and traffic flow
is regulated according to how many cars are
on the road. This ‘GPS-powered’ traffic light
also favors cyclists and the Danes say it has
decreased overall travel time for motorists by
17 percent.
What Doctoroff did not say, however,
is the new wave of hardware deployments
required by something as simple as adaptive
traffic signals.
Enter the Edge
Edge computing is a distributed and open

IT architecture that features decentralized
compute power. This enables mobile
computation, IoT, and applications such as
smart cities.
In Edge computing, data is processed near
the source of the data by a local server rather
than being transmitted to a traditional data
center.
Edge computing should be seen as
an extension of the data center industry,
delivering resources through more dynamic,
miniature counterparts of the conventional
data center.
It requires new methods of data storage,
secure networking, faster networking, and
cooling. This means more investment into
the industry as a whole.
Edge computing will require a
collaborative effort from specialized sectors
such as telecoms to provide the blistering
speeds required. Network carriers will
"Building a complete
city from the ground up,
even on a small scale
like this, is a unique
opportunity to develop
future technologies,
including a digital
operating system for the
city's infrastructure"
provide infrastructure, and data centers will
deliver new local storage space for Edge
computation and also upload non-real time
data to traditional cloud services.
So far no one knows what the sheer scale
of the costs in these developments will reach,
but we do have some clues.
A report by the White House-backed
SmartAmerica group estimates that US city
governments will invest approximately $41
trillion over the next 20 years to upgrade their
infrastructure to benefit from the IoT.
The main challenge with smart cities and
its reliance on the ‘Edge’ will be who is going
to operate it. The opportunities for different
scales of company will depend crucially on
the ecosystem which underpins the new
infrastructure.
It’s possible that ecosystems will be
deliberately constructed so that small
companies can flourish by developing
specialisms in processing vast amounts of
people’s data. Alternatively, we could hand
the figurative ‘keys’ of the city to the likes of
Edge Supplement | Smart City Blueprints
Google or Amazon, who already have the
capacity to roll out infrastructure like this on
a giant scale.
The term ‘hyperscale’ has never before
been quite so literal.
Building a city
New York or Copenhagen were never
designed to be a “smart city.” They were
laid out long before the widespread use of
automobiles, phones, and electricity - let
alone any digital technology.
Despite what many may think, sometimes
it’s easier to just build a whole new city,
an approach which is famously being
implemented in China.
In the US, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) has created
a blueprint of the different approaches.
One method would be for the city
authorities to build the infrastructure and
own it. This is a traditional approach where
a government agency assembles a set of
specific requirements - in this case, for
an IoT network - and then advertises the
competitive contract. As part of the deal, the
government offers to pay for the entire cost
of construction and installation - provided
the government ends up with full ownership
of the completed system.
This approach gives lower operating
costs, and avoids the application of
government network constraints. It should
also make it easier to deploy new services.
The trade-off is the high level of public sector
investment, including large capital costs,
on-going operational costs, and the need for
a highly skilled engineering team to operate
and maintain the network.
An alternative method is the Corporate
Model. For a clear example, we can head to
Japan, where car manufacturer Toyota is
building the Woven City - a small smart city
where the corporation promises to make
everyday life automated and intelligent.
At the Consumer Electronics Show 2020
(CES 2020), Toyota showed off its Woven City
plans, describing it as a ‘living laboratory’ for
the ‘subjects’ who will reside there.
"Building a complete city from the ground
up, even on a small scale like this, is a unique
opportunity to develop future technologies,
including a digital operating system for the
city's infrastructure," said Toyota president
Akio Toyoda.
"With people, buildings and vehicles all
connected and communicating with each
other through data and sensors, we will be
able to test connected AI technology... in
both the virtual and the physical realms...
maximizing its potential."
Toyota claims the 175-acre city will be
built in 2021. The company has also been
acquiring technology for autonomous
transportation such as the $394 million
investment into Joby Aviation, a vertical take
off and landing company designing small
planes to be used as air taxis.
Utopian Networking
A smart city is one thing; a 5G smart
city opens the door to full automation
capabilities, potentially making the promises
of projects like Woven City more plausible.
The next generation mobile data
technology, 5G, could enable effective smart
cities. Synergies between municipal and
consumer applications of the technology
could ease the rollout and maximize the
potential of smart city functions.
Every network carrier is racing to deploy
the fastest network for its customers, and
there are no signs of that slowing down. Data
centers can capitalize on the data explosion
this will bring, and smart cities will come to
rely on the capabilities that 5G promises.
Networks with 5G functions can deliver
lower latency (faster local data) and will have
lower energy consumption compared to
today’s infrastructure. This correlates well
with the goals of the data center industry,
making a win-win relationship for both
industries.
“All those 5G antennas that will soon
provide super-fast connections will also have
to be connected to fiber optic cables below
the ground,” said Petra Claessen, director of
BTG, a group of large telecoms customers
based in the Netherlands.
Speaking at the Smart City Congress
in Barcelona in late 2019, she went on: “In
order to avoid having to break open the
sidewalk three times in the future, a law must
be quickly put in place to ensure that the
mobile network operators will share their
infrastructure.”
Combining the Edge with the cloud
Edge devices have limited power constraints,
as they need a very long battery life, because
their sheer number requires them to work
unattended in order to make economic
sense.
On the other hand, the cloud has access
to virtually unlimited electricity in its central
locations, but has massive power efficiency
granted it by the economies of scale.
The objective of Edge computing is to
combine these two in real-time and provide a
great user experience, while supporting new
mega-applications such as smart cities.
For this reason, Edge computing data
centers and hyperscale data centers will
coexist rather than replace one another.
Depending on the use case, the two data
center archetypes will be blended to meet the
necessary requirements.
Smart cities will have to utilize a variety
of technologies to build the next generation
metropolitan utopia.
Edge Supplement 15
apc.com/edge