Ad-Astra: Towards A Reliable Edge Runtime Environment for Intelligent Connected Vehicles

The cyber-physical system is converging with the IT system, and so is the mobility industry. Establishing a reliable distributed system, which involves offloading computing-intensive functions to the edge and/or cloud, is crucial for achieving a seam-less vehicle-edge-cloud continuum. Instead of merely providing supplementary assistance for vehicles, our focus is on building a reliable runtime environment at the edge to offload onboard functions of intelligent connected vehicles. We attempted to incor-porate virtualization for isolation and portability, orchestration for redundancy and scheduling, monitoring for failure detection, and service recovery. Through implementation and experiments in a real-world scenario involving multiple intersections within a city demo zone, we have identified the gap in meeting real-time, reliable, and safety-critical requirements using commercial off-the-shelf components. The challenges blocking the function offloading towards the off-board system are discussed.