Europe working on cross-border 5G for driverless vehicles
There are an increasing number of European Union projects working on making 5G feasible to operate connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) across international and national borders.
However, standardized connectivity and roaming charges remain as being among the greatest potential challenges in some markets. These issues could present themselves as being obstacles to the proper, efficient and safe function of CAVs – not just in Europe but also in other parts of the world where regulations, roaming policies and connectivity standards often widely differ.
Caroline Bergmann, spokesperson for Deutsche Telekom, comments: “Until there is seamless connectivity, a number of challenges still need to be overcome. This refers to legal, organizational and also technical aspects. For cross-border connectivity, all EU telecoms companies need to work together.”
5GCroCo and 5GCarmen
One project is 5GCroCo that has attracted €17M ($16.91M) of funding from the EU. The principal tech partners of the project with the EU are Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson. There is also, as highlighted by Bergmann, the 5GCarmen project. She says they were designed as research and development projects to develop, test and verify the basic principles of seamless mobility in cross-border traffic. Deutsche Telekom has participated in both projects.
She adds: “We will now start deploying selected cross-border connections with selected EU telecom partners based on the results. These selected deployments will serve as a blueprint for further cross-border seamless handovers to ensure seamless mobility in the EU. Mobile edge computing (MEC) plays an important role in low-latency services.”
“For example, for Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) services or intelligent transport systems (ITS). A prerequisite for the continuity of MEC services is seamless mobility (see above). Therefore, seamless mobility is the basis for the use of MEC-based services also in cross-border situations.”
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