Bandwidth & Latency For Self Driving Car
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SPEED & BANDWIDTH
Let's assume data as a Car. Then bandwidth will be a freeway.
To receive more data from the internet and make your downloads faster, the freeway needs to be ‘wider’. In other words, say 1 Mbps is equivalent to 1 lane freeway. Now if you are trying to download a 5 Mb image, and you have a bandwidth of 1 Mbps, it would take you roughly 5 seconds to download the image.
Now let’s say that you have a 5 Mbps (bandwidth) connection or a 5 lane freeway. How fast will you receive your image? 1 second.
Simply, more bandwidth means that you’ll have access to high-speed data in a given time. In this situation, you can download 5 images with the wider bandwidth in the same amount of time you could 1 with a narrower bandwidth.
So In other words, 5 Mbps doesn’t mean faster downloads
LATENCY
Latency in simple terms means delay.
It is usually measured in milliseconds or ms and is the amount of delay (or time) it takes to send information from one point to another.
Present-day networks have achieved impressive speeds with 4G Long Term Evolution networks connecting subscribers and applications 100 times faster than 2G networks. With the coming of new-age technology, network speeds will only increase in the future. However, network performance is not only about speed.
Networks that have better bandwidth (read wider space) and low latency (read less delay) will be able to pass benefits to the subscribers in this age of digital transformation.
Role and relevance of Bandwidth & latency today for Self Driving Vehicle
The success of driverless automobiles depends entirely on the communication backbone and its performance. For a driverless car to weave in and out of high-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic, it needs to be plugged into a network that will offer connectivity with the lowest latency levels. A delay in transmitting and receiving a signal or an input can be disastrous on roads where split-second reflexes rule the roads.
Bandwidth comes into action if the infrastructure also needs a high influx of data.
