Ericsson Routes: Informed Connectivity for Tele-Operations

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 19: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: Terrace

Gyan Ranjan

Chief Technology Officer, Ericsson Routes

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

In this talk, we highlight the critical dependence of tele-operations - for remotely operated vehicles (RoVs) - on the quality of underlying network connectivity. Public cellular networks are the de-facto connectivity services providers (CSPs) in this space. Not only are CSPs extremely complex, and architecturally opaque to end users, little attention is paid to assessing real-time quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) - beyond the perfunctory and aggregate KPI metrics - particularly on the user-end. The assumption by vehicular operators, therefore, that desired levels of connectivity are/will-be available at any place, any time, is fallacious and poses grave operational and human risks. We motivate Ericsson Routes - an API based platform for predicting real-time network (QoS) - as a first step towards informed, cross-operator, observability into network connectivity. The aim - at first - is to enable route planning (comparative evaluation) based on network QoS parameters; eventually, leading up to real-time actuation in a variety of tele-operation tasks. We also discuss the unique opportunities for collaboration in this space, as well as the underlying challenges that impede data and knowledge sharing; with the hope that it will encourage constructive dialog between concerned parties. Not only can such collaboration help smoothen the path for tele-operations, but also lead ultimately to full-autonomy in future.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Gyan Ranjan, Ph.D., serves as the Chief Technology Officer of the Ericsson Routes Incubated Unit. His primary interests lie in the field of systems and network observability, resource provisioning, operations-and-management and system optimization. Currently, his work is focussed on enabling informed choices in autonomous vehicle operations: such as, route selection based on the quality of network connectivity expected along an intended transportation route. At Ericsson Routes, along with his team, he has helped develop an API based platform for predicting network quality a priori as well as real-time during trips.

Dr. Ranjan received his doctorate in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and has since been involved in research and development of autonomous, learning and "intelligent" systems in various domains (including networks and systems security). He has also taught graduate level courses at the University of California, Davis; and continues to participate in academic and industrial research in fields related to graph and network theoretic modeling as well as its application to the now-pervasive - and highly overrated - disciplines of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

PRESENTATION FILE