Managing Bandwidth: The Key to Cloud-Assisted Autonomous Driving

Alexander Krentsel, Peter Schafhalter, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica

Abstract: Prevailing wisdom asserts that one cannot rely on the cloud for critical real-time control systems like self-driving cars. We argue that we can, and must. Following the trends of increasing model sizes, improvements in hardware, and evolving mobile networks, we identify an opportunity to offload parts of time-sensitive and latency-critical compute to the cloud. Doing so requires carefully allocating bandwidth to meet strict latency SLOs, while maximizing benefit to the car.