A rental car company wants to offer a service to their clients where the renter can leave a self-driving car wherever they want when the rental period is up. A company operator will then remotely drive the left vehicles back to the rental location. Where should the application for remote car control and driving reside and why?

The remote control of a moving vehicle is a safety-critical application that demands ultra-low latency and high reliability. Any delay between the operator's command and the car's response could be catastrophic. The edge cloud architecture is specifically designed for such use cases. By placing the control application geographically closer to the vehicle at the network edge, it significantly reduces the round-trip time (latency) for data transmission. This proximity minimizes network hops and potential points of failure, thereby enhancing both the responsiveness and reliability required for safe remote driving.

A. This is incorrect because latency is the most critical factor for remotely controlling a moving vehicle. A central cloud, due to its physical distance, cannot provide the required low latency.
B. This is incorrect because high throughput (bandwidth) does not guarantee low latency. Latency is primarily determined by the physical distance and the number of network hops, which are high for a central cloud.
C. This is incorrect because while the application runs on the car, the remote control signals must still traverse the network, and this architecture does not inherently solve the network latency problem for the control loop.

1. Nokia Bell Labs Consulting. (2017). The 5G Business Potential: An operator’s guide to the 5G-era value chain, business models and opportunities. In the "5G-enabled industries" section, the report discusses the automotive vertical, highlighting that use cases like remote driving are enabled by the ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) capabilities of 5G, which are delivered via edge cloud deployments. (See Chapter 4: 5G-enabled industries, Automotive section).

2. Nokia White Paper. (2020). Harnessing the power of the intelligent edge. This document explains that for real-time applications like connected cars and remote operations, processing must happen at the edge to meet stringent latency requirements. It states, "The edge cloud is essential for applications that need to process huge amounts of data with minimal delay (latency)." (See Section: "Why the edge is so important").

3. ETSI. (2018). ETSI GR MEC 017 V1.1.1: Mobile Edge Computing (MEC); Deployment of Mobile Edge Computing in an NFV Environment. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard for MEC explicitly identifies automotive use cases (V2X) as a key driver for edge computing, citing the need to "provide ultra-low latency and high bandwidth" which is not feasible with traditional centralized cloud models. (See Section 5.2: Use Cases - Vehicular-to-Everything (V2X) Communications).