Autonomous transportation will arrive far faster away from public roads, at sites such as ports, airports and industrial complexes where drivers can be trained and all vehicles identified clearly, without having to cater for as many unpredictable situations. This will in turn help develop, test and tune the technology for later deployment on public road networks.
Such deployments are already occurring with the latest at the Port of Barcelona in Spain where Telefónica is rolling out a mobile network incorporating the 5G version of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X). This initially pilot deployment was commissioned by Netherlands-based port operating company APM Terminals, for connecting not just conventional vehicles around the site but also cranes and other machinery for loading, as well as stationary infrastructure such as streetlights.
People are also included via smartphones, which strictly also become nodes of the C-V2X network, playing a role in the transition from guided movement towards autonomous control. “The smartphone becomes another piece of the V2X environment, as well as the lever for an easy transition towards a fleet of natively connected vehicles and direct inclusion of people in the ecosystem,” said Telefónica.
The objective then is to migrate through C-V2X to a cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS), with automated movement of wirelessly interconnected vehicles and equipment monitored by humans in a control room backhauled via 5G. Some data is then offloaded to Telefónica ’s data center nearby in Barcelona for analysis and storage.
Data is then shared continuously, providing the live position and trajectory of machinery, vehicles, and people, enabling coordination of the traffic. As a secondary level of protection, there is an alarm system to warn of imminent collisions or accidents.
Each component’s location is shown in real time on a dashboard in the control room by a positioning system accurate to within centimeters, according to Telefónica.
Telefónica has some form in C-V2X, having made that a focus of investment going back to the original 4G/LTE version. This came along with the 3GPP Release 14 specifications for C-V2X communications, finalized in 2017. By that time the alternative WiFi version of V2X communications, called DSRC or ITS-G5 in Europe, was more advanced and already deployed by a number of vehicle makers, at least in trials. This gained some traction in Europe, North America and Japan, but little elsewhere.
It was in 2016 when Toyota became the first automaker to introduce vehicles equipped with V2X, using DSRC and only for sale in Japan. In 2017, GM then became the second automaker to introduce V2X for its Cadillac model in the United States, also equipped with DSRC.
At this stage the 4G/LTE version of cellular V-2X was handicapped by lack of support for highly local communications from vehicle to vehicle or roadside infrastructure. This omission was sustained in the first 5G version introduced with 3GPP Release 15, which therefore just enabled V2N (vehicle-to-network) use cases, such as delivery of entertainment or navigation. The omission was finally rectified in 3GPP Release 16 with support for 5G NR (New Radio), including direct communications for V2V/V2I (vehicle-to-vehicle and -infrastructure).
This direct communication between vehicle and other devices uses the existing PC5 interface. That is essentially a side channel allowing two devices, such as mobile handset or indeed vehicles, to communicate directly without communicating via the cellular base station. PC5 was originally developed for mission-critical public safety communication in release 13 in recognition that mobile connectivity had become the default rather than fixed line phones.
Then, armed with direct local communications, C-V2X gained the upper hand over WiFi based DSRC, combining local with long distance cellular communications which vehicles were increasingly equipped with anyway. Another advantage was demonstrably lower latency for local communications, essential not just for autonomous driving but also earlier safety critical features such as emergency braking. China was first to see which way the wind was blowing and mandated C-V2X for its vehicular communications while outlawing DSRC. Now every car sold in China must support C-V2X communications by 2025.
Then, as we have explained in earlier stories, both Europe and North America have in different ways accommodated C-V2X after earlier looking like making support for DSRC/ITS-G5 mandatory. This led to a new European standard defining use of C-V2X as an access layer technology for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) devices. As a result, ETSI standards and specifications that define other higher level ITS protocols have been updated to include C-V2X for the underlying access layer. These standards and specifications have been included in the ETSI ITS Release 1 specification set and provide the basis for development of interoperable C-V2X ITS implementations and devices from multiple vendors.
Meanwhile, the USA’s FCC moved to allocate 30 MHz of the 5.9 GHz ITS spectrum for C-V2X basic safety applications. The band had previously been entirely dedicated to DSRC.
Telefónica also picked up on the drift towards C-V2X and participated in its project in 2018 culminating in a demonstration in February 2019 coinciding with Mobile World Congress. This showed connected car and driving use cases assisted by 5G in a real environment in collaboration with several key players, including Spanish carmaker SEAT, Ericsson and Qualcomm.
It was a classic connected vehicle demonstrator within the 5G Barcelona initiative, aimed at consolidating the city as the reference 5G hub in Europe, supporting communication between cars and relevant surrounding elements such as traffic lights, traffic signals, pedestrians, cyclists and motorcycles. An edge computing server was deployed to keep latency down for processes involving more intensive computation.
This provided the foundation for the ongoing Port of Barcelona project. Meanwhile though there are still issues to resolve before C-V2X can be said to have fully emerged as the predominant communications medium for vehicles. The main one lies in the ecosystem and ensuring that the full C-V2X stack is implemented in vehicles, including the direct short range communications.
A number of operators, including AT&T, have expressed concerns over this point, more in the context of delaying deployment of C-V2X and establishing that critical mass needed to open up large scale applications and build momentum towards future autonomous driving.
There is also, in Europe more particularly, the continued dichotomy between the cellular C-V2X and WiFi-based DSRC/ITS-G5. Given the amount of cross-border driving in Europe there is a clear need for interoperability between countries and systems, which either requires multinational commitment to one or the other, or support for both, which raise costs of chipsets.
This issue has been compounded by divergence among automobile makers, although with signs of convergence around C-V2X or at least implementation of it in parallel with DSRC. This has been driven partly by the imperative of having to support C-V2X to succeed in the Chinese market.
GM was originally firmly in the WiFi camp, yet in November 2020 became the first to come out with a C-V2X ready production vehicle, its Buick GL8 minivan manufactured by Shanghai GM, its joint venture with Chinese automaker SAIC Motor.
Three months earlier in August 2020 GM had announced at Tech Day in Shanghai, that 5G would be available on all new Cadillac models, along with most Chevrolet and Buick vehicles going forward. Connected services would be provided through over-the-air updates.
Similarly, Volkswagen had to engage with C-V2X in order to collaborate with SAIC Motor over their joint venture SAIC Volkswagen Automotive. Volkswagen still promotes DSRC though elsewhere, certainly in Europe. As recently as October 2019, the company unveiled the eighth generation of its Golf hatchback, sporting for the first time a full V2X stack but WiFi-based, described as using “swarm intelligence from traffic via Car2X to warn against hazards on an anticipatory basis”.
Ford on the other hand did a complete volte-face, switching from DSRC to C-V2X nine months before that Volkswagen Golf release at CES 2019 in January that year. There it aligned with technology developed by Qualcomm and Huawei with a pledge to introduce C-V2X in its vehicles in 2022.
The direction of automotive connectivity is therefore fairly clearly now towards the 5G C-V2X, but with DSRC/ITS-G5 holding on for some time in Europe and also Japan, where Toyota is notable for stubbornly resisting the tide.