5G, Robotics, AVs, and the Eternal Problem of Latency

Autonomous vehicles, factory robots, and virtual reality are probably unattainable until we wring latency out of our networks. Engineers are working on it

Show Notes

Engineers will tell you that for an orchestra to rehearse remotely, it would need at least 500 megabits per second to avoid throwing off the synchronicity of a concert performance. But that’s using high bandwidth as a proxy for latency. Why not work on reducing latency directly? Because it’s hard. Nonetheless, at the cutting edge of network engineering, researchers are working on it. And not for orchestras. Autonomous vehicles, factory robots, virtual reality, piloting drones, robotic surgery, and even advanced prosthetics all require latency to get down toward one millisecond. So says our guest today, Shivendra Panwar, author of an article in November’s IEEE Spectrum magazine, “Breaking the Latency Barrier.” 

What is Fixing the Future?

Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.