5G V2X Communications for Platooning
- Reference number
- SM18-0010
- Start and end dates
- 190101-201231
- Amount granted
- 1 167 050 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Halmstad University College
- Research area
- Information, Communication and Systems Technology
Summary
This project is a "sabbatical" stay of Professor Alexey Vinel from Halmstad University to work at Qamcom Research & Technology AB in Göteborg during 2019-2020. The focus is on platooning which is a linking of vehicles on highways in convoy through wireless communications for the sake of safer, cleaner and more efficient transportation. Ultra-reliable low-latency inter-vehicular communication protocols, which we will design, are key enabler for platooning. We will define technical possibilities and suggest solutions for how to use existing LTE and future 5G networks to support multi-brand platoons. There is no legacy solution for platooning inter-vehicular communications and our goal is to contribute to its development with a focus on vendor-dependent elements. More specifically, we will design schedulers for LTE sidelink mode 4 and 5G sidelink unicast communication to support platooning. We will extend open-source simulators Veins LTE and Plexe and contribute to building of semi-virtual experimental 5G environment at AstaZero in order to evaluate the performance of our solutions. We will facilitate collaboration with Profesors Karl Henrik Johansson (KTH), Fredrik Tufvesson (LTH) and Petar Popovski (AAU) to co-produce jointly with Qamcom high-quality academic publications and to develop few project proposals. Our results will support strategically important autonomous driving application and develop forefront use-case to utilize new 5G telecommunications infrastructure.
Popular science description
Stockholm is one of the first cities to have new fifth-generation telecommunication technology (5G) rolled out already in 2018. Apart from traditional broadband Internet access for mobile users, 5G aims at supporting critical Internet-of-Things applications, e.g. telemedicine, industrial automation and autonomous vehicles. Making such safety-critical applications dependent on wireless connectivity becomes possible only if ultra-reliable low-latency communication protocols are in place. The design of these protocols for one specific application is a goal of this project. We will define technical possibilities and suggest solutions on how to use 5G infrastructure in order to support future autonomous driving technology named platooning. Platooning is linking of vehicles on highways in a convoy through connectivity. The truck at the head of the platoon acts as the leader, with the vehicles behind reacting and adapting to changes in its movement requiring little to no action from drivers. With this, multiple positive effects are achieved. First, platooning lowers fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, since when trucks can drive close together, the air-drag friction is reduced significantly. Second, platooning helps to improve safety since braking by the the vehicles following the lead vehicle is automatic and vehicle-to-vehicle communications delays are shorter than human reaction times. Third, platooning optimises transportation by using roads more effectively, e.g. delivering goods faster and reducing traffic jams. There is no standardized or dominant solution for 5G-based communication protocols to support platooning and our goal is to contribute to their development. We will design schedulers for vehicle-to-vehicle communication with assistance of cellular network to meet reliability-latency requirements. We will work with sidelink unicast communication which enables acknowledged communication increasing the transmission reliability in comparison to current broadcast solutions. We will interact with main stakeholders, e.g. Swedish truck manufacturers Volvo Trucks and Scania, telecommunications manufacturer Ericsson and standardization bodies - European Telecommunications Standards Institute and 5G Automotive Association. We will extend open-source platooning mobility and cellular communications simulators to evaluate the performance of our solutions and will collaborate with AstaZero vehicle safety environment in Hällered to set up experiments.