A Lightweight Virtualisation Platform for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility

Digital mobility systems such as autonomous cars or traffic management build on connectivity and automated cooperation. In order to facilitate various use cases such as vehicle manoeuvres, infotainment support or state share functions, a distributed layered computation and communication infrastructure is needed that connects vehicles and other devices through mobile networks, linking them to edge and cloud services. Of particular relevance are lightweight clustered infrastructures close to the edge of the network that provide nonetheless sufficient compute, storage and networking capabilities. Clusters consisting of single-board devices are used in a variety of these use cases. In most cases, data that is accumulated on the devices has to be sent to remote cloud hubs for processing. However, with the hardware capabilities of these controllers continuously increasing, it is now possible to directly process data on these edge cluster. This concept is known as Edge Computing. We propose an edge computing architecture for cooperative, connected and automated mobility that relies on industry-standard technologies such as the MQTT protocol for communication, Prometheus for monitoring and Docker swarm in conjunction with openFaas for deploying containerized services.