In her recorded welcome remarks at the recent ITS World Congress in Los Angeles, European Commissioner Adina Valean mentioned the European Union’s plan to have “uninterrupted 5G coverage for Europe’s major transport corridors” by 2025. Fittingly, ERTICO organised a Workshop on 5G Connectivity at the ITS World Congress to review the current and upcoming developments of 5G for Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM), exploring their associated use cases and timelines, and analysing the benefits offered and value added to the use cases by the stakeholders’ co-creation.

5G for CAM: lessons learnt from 5G-MOBIX

The Workshop at the Congress was hosted and moderated by Coen Bresser, Senior Manager of Innovation and Deployment and Coordinator of the ERTICO-led 5G-MOBIX project. The ambition and activities of 5G-MOBIX were designed to help deliver on the European Commission’s goal of 5G deployment. The project, which concluded last month, executed trials along cross-border and urban corridors using 5G core technological innovations to qualify the 5G infrastructure and evaluate its benefits in the CCAM context. It also defined deployment scenarios and identified and responded to standardisation and spectrum gaps.

Results from 5G-MOBIX pointed to three essential takeaways regarding 5G for CAM:

  • 5G delivers a capable solution for CAM
  • That you can use now​
  • And can further evolve​.

5G Connectivity Workshop at the ITS World Congress

The 5G Connectivity Workshop in Los Angeles was the third of a series, following those held at the ITS World Congresses in Singapore (2019) and Hamburg (2021).  The objective of the Workshop was to review the groundwork for the deployment of 5G for seamless CAM. Central to this exercise were the three main conclusions or lessons learnt summarized by the 5G-MOBIX project, and further explored by the speakers of the workshop.

After an overview of current and upcoming developments, speakers presented the most suitable use-cases for CAM and their associated timelines. There was an analysis of the stakeholders’ co-creation towards benefitting the expected values of the proposed use cases. The discussion focused on values of aspects like traffic management, energy consumption and safer and more comfortable driving.

With connectivity being a key enabler for smooth and efficient CAM, seamless and cross-border 5G solutions for vehicle-to-everything (V2X), covering both short and long-range communication were highlighted. Experts participating in the Workshop also touched on how stakeholders could deploy 5G technology for the envisioned use cases to fulfill their own business and common societal interests by ensuring CAM is adequately supported.

An international panel across sectors

The 5G Workshop boasted a panel of experts from the three regions of the ITS Congress partnership (Americas, Asia Pacific, EMEA) representing different stakeholder groups.

Dr Maxime Flament, Chief Technical Officer at 5GAA (Belgium) gave an overview of the organisation’s progress on current CAM activities and the envisioned roadmap for availability of CCAM use cases.

Dr Evangelia Portouli, Senior Researcher at ICCS (Greece), presented findings in terms of technology and impact from 5G-MOBIX –  one of the key projects focusing on cross-border 5G for CAM.

Julia Rainer, Technical Developer for V2X connectivity enablers at AUDI AG (Germany), described the current developments and deployments of CAM use cases from the perspective of OEMs targeting the private transport market, delivering a view of automakers with regards to the complexity on how to navigate international markets and different technologies.

Dr Gosan Noh, principal researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute-ETRI (Korea) shared lessons learned from the development, deployment, and in-field demonstration of some specific 5G CAM use cases including tethering-via-vehicle and remote driving. The presentation included 5G-specific technical features such as mmWave beamforming and high mobility handover.

Erik Varney, Managing Director of Industrial IoT & Telematics at Verizon (USA), discussed how 5G fits within specs of CV2X and what is being developed and deployed in the US. He explored the timelines for availability of 5G within the US and showed that CAM deployments are on the near horizon.

Ralf Weber, Technical Director of the Qualcomm Standards and Industry Organizations (QSIO) department on 5G and Vehicular-to-Everything (V2X) communication (Germany), also co-organised the workshop. He presented insights from technology providers for mobile communication, navigation and computer systems, which become essential enablers for CAM and can be shown to provide positive impact on a more sustainable and greener environment.

“The presentations and discussion at the well-attended Workshop further substantiate what we have concluded from the work carried out in 5G-MOBIX”, says Coen Bresser. “5G delivers a capable solution for CAM, which is ready for use now but there is still some work to do.”