Cross-industry alliance targets 5G development
Article By : Christoph Hammerschmidt
The 5G mobile networks will include V2X applications—but not on the basis of the IEE 802.11p standard currently favoured by many players.
Carmakers Audi, BMW and Daimler have teamed up with telecommunications equipment providers Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia as well as semiconductor vendors Intel and Qualcomm to evolve, test and promote communications solutions for connected mobility. The efforts will focus on the development of 5G mobile technologies.
The “5G Automotive Association” announced to develop, test and promote communications solutions, support standardisation and accelerate the commercial availability of such solutions. Users will benefit in that the solutions will improve connected mobility and safety, ubiquitous access to services and integration of services with smart cities and intelligent transportation solutions. And of course, the technology to be developed will also address autonomous driving.
The 5G mobile networks the partners plan to roll out will also include V2X applications—not on the basis of the widespread IEE 802.11p standard currently favoured by many players, but instead based on mobile networks, cloud connectivity and cellular connectivity (C-V2X). Since future applications in the connected car, the technologies to be developed also hold out the prospect of ending the bandwidth bottleneck of today’s mobile networks. In addition, 5G promises much shorter latency.
Thus, it can better support mission-critical functions for safer driving and will further support enhanced vehicle-to-everything communications and connected mobility solutions. These new solutions bring also new technological and business opportunities for both the automotive and ICT industries, the members of the association said in a joint press release.
The association will address key technical and regulatory issues, leveraging next generation mobile networks and integrating vehicle platforms with connectivity, networking and computing solutions.
The main activities of the alliance will include the defining and harmonizing use cases and technical requirements, driving the standardisation process and running joint R&D projects with the goal of integrated solutions, interoperability testing and large scale pilots. Another important topic for the member is addressing automotive connectivity requirements including security and privacy aspects as well as distributed cloud architectures.
The organisation is open for further interested parties. In fact, several companies already have declared their intent to join soon, according to the association.
“We expect 5G to become the worldwide dominating mobile communications standard of the next decade,” said Christoph Grote, Senior Vice President Electronics at carmaker BMW. “For the automotive industry it is essential that 5G fulfills the challenges of the era of digitalisation and autonomous driving.”