Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 5G-MOBIX (5G for cooperative & connected automated MOBIility on X-border corridors)
Reporting period: 2018-11-01 to 2020-09-30
As Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are already being introduced into the market and they are expected to increase their penetration with a steady rate, by 2030 a significant portion of the vehicles on the road will be able to support some level of automation. The progression to higher levels of automation and penetration rate promise increased safety, efficiency and a greener impact of mobility through reduced accidents, more efficient fuel consumption, and a reduction of emissions.
The inherent mobility of vehicles and the stringent service requirements of CCAM applications create multiple challenges when a CAV is served by its Home 5G network and crosses the border to another country while an autonomous driving application is engaged. That means that the vehicle’s connectivity will have to change from its Home network to the Visited network without causing long interruption in the vehicles connectivity with the application server and without significantly degrading the performance of the service.
As the EU is moving towards a connected European market supported by major European Transport Paths [https://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/infrastructure/ten-t_en] it is imperative that such CCAM applications are also supported across national borders to facilitate communication and commerce. The potential societal, financial and environmental benefits delivered via the ubiquitous support of CCAM services over 5G connectivity are expected to be quite significant.
To help realise these 5G-MOBIX has set objectives to:
1. Formulate a comprehensive set of 5G technological requirements for advanced CCAM relevant for the automotive, telecom, IT and services industries, and for R&D and public authorities.
2. Establish corridors to evaluate complementary 5G technologies and advanced CCAM in both highway cross-border and urban mobility scenarios under all conditions.
3. Analyse costs and benefits of dedicated and validated 5G architecture and CCAM to justify commercially the proposed recommendations.
4. Explore and assess new business opportunities for CCAM with 5G.
5. Provide 5G deployment scenarios and recommendations to drive CCAM adoption and effective implementations from business and policy perspectives.
6. Sustain standardisation and spectrum allocation by actively contributing to the discourse.
7. Scale up and replicate for a global adoption of the 5G for CCAM.
Specifically, the following results have been achieved:
• Requirements analysis and detailed definition of CCAM use cases.
• Identification and detailed analysis of the CCAM cross-border challenges and their respective potential solutions to be tested in the 5G-MOBIX trials.
• Definition of the design and end-to-end architecture of the 5G networks, autonomous vehicles, On-Board Units (OBU), Road-Side Units (RSU) and applications to be used in the 5G-MOBIX cross-border trials.
• Deployment of more than eight 5G networks (six with NSA architecture and two with SA architecture) across the 5G-MOBIX cross-border corridors and national trial sites.
• Development and implementation of the HW and SW required to enable the 5G-MOBIX use cases, including contributions of the national trials sites to the two cross-border corridors.
• Definition of the trialling methodology to be followed.
• Definition of the testing framework, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) framework, common logging format and measurement tools to be used for the evaluation of the trial results.
• Initial investigation of recommendations for removing barriers through deployment options, new business models for 5G and CCAM, standardization and spectrum and policies, regulation and certification.
• Communication and dissemination: website (8850+ users), Twitter (82 followers, 487 hashtag (re)tweets, LinkedIn (222 followers, 94 project related posts), videos (9), press releases & articles (86), newsletters (7, 218 subscribers, 44+% opening rate), brochures (300 copies distributed), leaflets (1 designed and distributed through EC brochure), posters (2), webinars (4, average 125 participants), conferences (50), trade shows (16), project events (5, average 60 visitors), demonstrations (4), papers & articles (73).
Currently, final integration and testing of the cross-border corridor components is underway and the 5G-MOBIX trials are set to start in Q1 2021, after the end-to-end operational verification of the corridors.
By the end of the project, the following significant results are expected with their respective impact:
• Detailed results and KPI measurements of multiple CCAM services over 5G connectivity in cross-border environments, offering insights into the expected QoS and impact of inter-PLMN mobility for CCAM services.
• Deployment of beyond state of the art 5G networks and cross-border CCAM services.
• Executed a combination of high profile trials with associated exposure and communication.
• Final analysis of the most critical cross-border challenges and the most successful mitigation measures, based on measured performance under real conditions.
• Detailed Deployment Study taking into account the views of the most prominent European 5G and CCAM stakeholders, providing insights into the most appropriate roadmap for 5G-enabled CCAM services in non-urban environments.
• Progression of IPR and realization of CCAM services, technology and knowledge at 53 partners throughout Europe.
• Validation of existing (external) products and services in a 5G cross-border architecture combined with a consolidated take up of the results by follow up projects, specifically the projects part of ICT-53 with which cooperation is being setup.
Currently, final integration and testing of the components for the national and cross-border corridor trial sites is underway. The trials are set to start in Q1 2021.