Are Driverless Cars The Ultimate Use Case For The Telecom Industry?

Are Driverless Cars The Ultimate Use Case For The Telecom Industry?

A group of representative organizations from the telecom industry has urged the European Union (EU) to “place 5G at the core of digital reform and shape upcoming laws with a view to increasing network investment and allow innovation”. As I have witnessed on the Mobile World Congress, the automotive industry is already investing in research and development aimed at driverless cars and there are many pilots going on around this basic idea. I believe that there are huge opportunities for the telecom industry to collaborate on these pilots through alliances and partnerships.

5G Automotive Association

German car manufacturer Volkswagen has come out with a technology service based roadmap for driverless cars. According to this roadmap, with the existing 4G, LTE networks and mobile broadband, they can support connected cars for certain limited use cases. However, for automated driving, they need a more scalable infrastructure for which 5G networks and technologies are needed. Mercedes too has pointed out to the requirements of 5G and ubiquitous connectivity to enable driverless car infrastructures. As a result of this, the 5GAA is created to connect organizations from the telecom industry with car manufacturers. This effort will get them to work together to develop end-to-end solutions for future mobility and transportation services.

Volkswagen is planning to utilize new connectivity standards that are required to enable driverless cars. This standard is referred to as V2X (Vehicle-to-everything), a standard that combines the V2V standard (Vehicle to Vehicle standard to improve the line of sight) and the V2I standard (Vehicle to Infrastructure in order to improve the traffic flow and safety).

The German Automotive Association has suggested a 5-phase approach in order to make driverless cars feasible. The five steps put forward by the association are:

• Phase 1 Assisted driving where technology assists the driver through functions such as providing information about weather and traffic or even helping to prevent accidents.
• Phase 2 Partly automated cars which can take over and drive autonomously on highways.
• Phase 3 Highly automated cars which can drive autonomously under most conditions.
• Phase 4 Fully automated cars or basically, driverless cars where the car completely takes over the driving from a human being.
• Phase 5 Driverless cars which can drive autonomously without any human being

Member companies of the 5G Automotive Association include among others Audi, BMW Group, Daimler, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm and Vodafone.

5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership

The 5GPP, initiated by the European Commission, has recently defined a research and innovation project under the name of 5GCar.

Read more : http://labs.sogeti.com/driverless-cars-ultimate-use-case-telecom-industry/