Auto giants, Audi, Toyota Motor Europe and other car manufacturers are working with Deutsche Telekom and Huawei to run technical field trials on LTE-Vehicular (LTE-V) - a potential enabler for road safety applications and traffic control services as well as emerging automated driving use cases.
Recently, these companies teamed up to test the leading edge connected vehicle technology at the “digital A9 motorway test bed" around the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt in Germany. The tests involve technical trials to validate the use of LTE-V connected vehicles technology.
LTE-V is an evolution variant of the fourth generation standard for mobile communications 4G LTE and is being specified within the European 3GPP project as part Release 14.
The standard is also touted to be integrated in the upcoming 5G.
This variant is specifically designed to meet automotive requirements for both Vehicle-To-Vehicle and Vehicle-To-Infrastructure communication. It can address multiple application types ranging from connected vehicle safety applications (e.g. collision warning, pedestrian warning, etc.) to connected vehicle smart mobility applications for increased efficiency. That will enable users, systems and cars to adapt the driving strategy for fuel savings and reduced travel delay.
Deutsche Telekom said that its infrastructure has been specially equipped with LTE-V hardware from Huawei to support the trial scenarios. Audi AG, Toyota Motor Europe and other car manufacturers have equipped research cars with the LTE-V hardware developed by Huawei.
Based on the trial results and experience gained, the partners will provide inputs into the standards specifications for LTE-V. The partners are also contributing to requirements definition for later releases of the 3GPP project, which will aim to enable a wide range of emerging use cases from connected and automated driving to new mobility services in the 5G era from 2020.
