Ericsson today announced it is providing Sunswift Racing with major improvements in Wireless WAN communications using Ericsson’s Intelligent Link Bonding. This capability combines multiple WAN links—cellular, satellite, or wired—into a single, logical connection and leverages unique traffic steering and cellular intelligence features to make decisions about how traffic is distributed. The Sunswift racing team is using Ericsson enterprise wireless solutions to provide uninterrupted connectivity between the solar race cars, support vehicles and Sunswift’s headquarters in Sydney.
Sunswift Racing is a team of innovators at the University of New South Wales in Australia, working to redefine the future of sustainable transport through the research and development of world class prototype electric cars. The team is best known for its Guinness World Record-holding success in previous World Solar Challenge events and will be competing at this year’s week-long event from Darwin to Adelaide, Australia in August.
The World Solar Challenge competitors rely on race and vehicle performance data to make strategic decisions during the week-long event. With real-time access to data enabled with Ericsson wireless connectivity solutions, the Sunswift team will be collecting and using live telemetry data during the race. This includes live data about the solar car’s battery, electric motor, solar panel, and vehicle speedometer. Reliable connectivity will also be vital for live video, IP Push-to-Talk communication for status reporting, real-time race video streaming for the team’s YouTube channel, and reliable internet access.
Ericsson Cradlepoint ruggedized R1900 routers connected to 5G and satellite links are managed with Ericsson NetCloud to provide multi-carrier connectivity back to Sunswift headquarters. Ericsson’s Intelligent Link Bonding will be used to optimize the bandwidth of all available WAN links to deliver consistent performance and always-on connectivity over cellular and satellite-supporting uninterrupted live telemetry data sharing and video streaming.
“This next evolution of uninterrupted connectivity from Ericsson will enable our team to perform at their peak during the upcoming race,” said Professor Richard Hopkins, Team Principal of UNSW Sunswift Racing. “The incredible success that Sunswift has had over the years, supported by continuous innovation in technology from partners like Ericsson has enabled us to launch P-ONE Technology, an agile, commercialization spin-out of Sunswift Racing, backed by UNSW and the Australian Governments TRaCE Trailblazer program. Working with some of the best technology providers in the world, our mission is to transform cutting-edge research into market-ready, automotive solutions through industry and government partnerships.”
Ericsson Intelligent Link Bonding enhances resiliency and performance with the following features:
- Flow duplication for high resiliency – Duplicates application traffic flows across two WAN links simultaneously to provide high availability.
- Flow balancing for link optimization and cost savings – Distributes traffic flows across multiple links based on predefined weights or percentages to enhance performance and cost efficiency.
- Bandwidth aggregation for increased bandwidth – Bandwidth aggregation combines two or more WAN connections to increase the overall bandwidth available for large data transfers. This can significantly boost performance for large file uploads or real-time video uploads.
Each of these intelligent bonding features can be enabled on an Ericsson Cradlepoint router with SD-WAN. Additional features such as application-based traffic steering, forward error correction, and rich AI insights can also be leveraged.
“At Ericsson, we are committed to ensuring uninterrupted connectivity during high-stakes race events. Our Intelligent Link Bonding technology empowers organizations to achieve unmatched application resiliency, enhanced performance, and optimized bandwidth use — even in the most challenging mobile environments,” said Archana Khetan, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Wireless Solutions at Ericsson. “As more businesses adopt multi-WAN strategies, managing these various connections intelligently is becoming essential. Showing how well this works in one of the world’s most challenging race environments underscores the value of this technology in any enterprise environment.”
Source: Press Release
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