Telefónica has sensorised and given 5G coverage to the Cereixal tunnel in Spain to bring intelligence to the road and facilitate assisted driving, improve the information available to drivers for their decision-making and enhance road safety.
Together with its project partners - Nokia, Ineco, Stellantis, the CTAG and SICE, the operator has made the Cereixal tunnel the first in Spain to be connected to vehicles. The smart tunnel sends information to drivers on the weather conditions at the exit, road works, warnings of slow vehicles, potential congestion, accidents, obstacles on the road, the presence of pedestrians, oncoming vehicles and sudden braking during their journeys through it, as well as warnings of the entry of emergency vehicles.
To do so it uses the specific capabilities for C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-everything) vehicular communications and IoT sensorisation and edge computing of the 5G network. Similarly, both the sensors (opacimeter, slippery road surface, visibility, weather station) and the cameras that are installed (DAI, thermal, detection of dangerous goods, detection of electric vehicles) make it possible to monitor the state of the tunnel and generate information and send it to a monitoring tool so that the infrastructure managers can view all the information collected by the IoT sensors, analyse it and, if necessary, issue alerts and warnings to the vehicles that pass through it.
Nokia is providing the project with end-to-end connectivity infrastructure, including Nokia AirScale 5G radio equipment, the 5G virtualised core, an MEC server and the Nokia 5G FastMile Gateway deployed in the tunnel as a 5G router.
Mercedes Fernández, Innovation Manager at Telefónica España
Initiatives such as the one implemented in the Cereixal tunnel, The 5G network’s high connectivity capabilities, low latency, maximum reliability and large bandwidths constitute key pillars in the connected car ecosystem, which is shifting from assisted driving to autonomous driving.
