Ericsson, Orange, and PSA Group, owner of the Peugeot and Citroen car brands, have carried out connected-vehicle field trials using 5G technology.
The trials were undertaken in France as part of the vendors' Towards 5G project, which took place along three kilometres of track in France.
PSA has been experimenting on two use cases for connected vehicles, which include ‘see through’ between two connected vehicles and notifying vehicles when emergency vehicles are fast approaching in real time.
The two use cases are in their initial phases and they use Cellular V2X (C-V2X) capabilities on the evolution towards 5G in a real environment.
The use cases are claimed to be taking advantage of improved latency and high throughput performance to deliver high-resolution video stream between two vehicles to demonstrate reactivity times for real time event notifications.
According to PSA, it has been implementing new radio networks (RAN) configured with edge-computing features that allow improved end-to-end transmission, with an average delay of 17 milliseconds for vehicle-to-network-to-vehicle (V2N2V) communications. Vehicles have been tested at 2.6GHz frequency band, with data transfer speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s.
PSA and Orange plan to implement a dedicated network slice to prioritise intelligent transportation system (ITS) vehicular traffic.
The companies are also planning to use direct communication features of C-V2X to test vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) capabilities, while assessing the enhanced performance brought by C-V2X Release 14 with regards to direct communication range, latency and reliability.
Qualcomm Technologies automotive product management vice president Nakul Duggal said “We are pleased to join PSA, Orange and Ericsson in the ‘Towards 5G’ initiative.
“Cellular-V2X R14 and its strong evolution towards 5G, using both network-based and direct communications, has great potential in helping achieve our common vision for safer, highly connected and smarter transportation.”
PSA Group also stated that it has received authorisation from the French government to conduct autonomous mode experimentations with ‘non-expert’ drivers. These tests are slated to begin this March.
With this move, the French automaker plans to let non-expert drivers travel about 2000km on French express roads and fine tune its autonomous vehicles.
