FatPipe Networks, the inventor of an SD-WAN solution, announced the successful completion of its cooperative demonstration of seamless failover networking technology with Project Darwin.
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Project Darwin is a collaboration between Darwin Innovation Group (Darwin) and partners, including Virgin Media O2, Hispasat and the European Space Agency, with the goal of developing connectivity solutions for autonomous vehicles. Darwin is developing technology that lets devices and vehicles switch communications seamlessly between satellite and terrestrial networks. This technology can be used to keep autonomous vehicles connected even in areas with variable coverage.
For this demonstration, Darwin equipped a van with this ubiquitous communications technology and drove it through Cornwall, a region of the UK with challenges for both satellite and terrestrial communications. The demonstration aimed to show how the technology allowed the van to transmit and receive information on the move without interruption, switching between satellite and terrestrial networks as necessary. FatPipe provided the technology that enabled communication between the vehicle and the server through terrestrial and satellite paths.
“As we carried out the test cases, we were pleased to confirm that the impact of switching between satellite and terrestrial cellular networks was unnoticeable from a quality-of-experience point of view. Later, when we analyzed the massive amount of data collected during the two days of testing, we were also elated to verify that, although we were out of coverage between 10% and 20% of the time for each of the networks, the convergent solution increased the overall availability of connectivity to 99% of the time,” said Rodrigo Barreto, Lead Architect at Darwin.
“FatPipe supplied the SD-WAN equipment in a timely manner and gave us access to an extremely dedicated support team, keen on going the extra mile to demonstrate equipment functionality and to diagnose configuration issues in the end-to-end path between vehicle and server at our laboratory,” said the Darwin team.
“We are happy to have been part of the Darwin Project,” said Ms. Sanch Datta, President and CTO of FatPipe Networks, and the inventor of SD-WAN. “FatPipe is designed for such use cases, and we are happy to note that FatPipe is designed to scale to meet the demands for large numbers of vehicles and their communication needs as well as for IoT deployment. FatPipe is capable of handling up to 16 million sessions simultaneously. FatPipe’s technology is designed to seamlessly failover data without dropping packets or sessions. FatPipe has full security features to prevent any intrusions. We look forward to working closely with the Darwin team as it implements its technology,” Ms Datta said.