Enhancing road safety through wireless vehicle communications

In recent years wireless automotive communications have grown from a mere service application into a large vertical tenant of new applications and services in the automotive domain.

With ever-growing affluence in many developing as well as industrialised countries, increases in individual mobility are becoming apparent. However, the increase in transportation system efficiency through traditional road building often reaches its limits in terms of land consumption and lack of public acceptance and engineers and scientists are looking for processes and technologies to enhance traffic flow through sophisticated traffic management.

The established intelligent transportation system (ITS) ITS-G5 is expected to avoid traffic congestion and increase overall traffic efficiency. End-to-end digitisation from single vehicles to road infrastructure and backend servers provides the basis for continuous traffic-flow control and management. Technological progress in the automotive industry towards automated driving and development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is propelling the fully digital transportation system.

The Cooperative ITS (C-ITS) transportation system enables all road users including pedestrians to communicate and cooperate with each other, and promises to increase efficiency and reduce road traffic fatalities and serious injuries — a primary goal of government agencies around the globe.

What is required is a mobile communications system that supports the reliable exchange of road traffic data even in scenarios where road users are travelling at high speed.

Two major motivations and objectives are driving the technology evolution: enhanced comfort in vehicles thanks to sophisticated entertainment services, and safety-related applications. The latter in particular is advancing several communications technologies such as the eCall introduction and the first direct communications scenarios.

Policymakers and the automotive industry are striving to improve vehicle safety. A new technology enables vehicles to directly communicate with each other as well as roadside units. Devices such as smartphones, backpacks and bicycles will include technology to communicate with vehicles. These devices would alert drivers to the presence of a cyclist on the road or a pedestrian on a crossing in order to greatly reduce the number of pedestrian-related injuries and fatalities. These direct communication systems are known by many different acronyms, such as V2V, V2I, ITS-G5 and C2x.

New communications paths like the ‘sidelink’ introduced in Release 12 of the 3GPP specifications, offer new connection scenarios such as V2X where ‘X’ stands for ‘everything’ in the communications path.

3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 14 specifies the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications service. This feature sets the starting point for the evolution of applications not previously supported by mobile communications technology.

Release 15 contains the definition of enhanced V2X communications scenarios and Release 16 links cellular-based V2X communications to 5G New Radio (NR) radio technology, offering much greater flexibility, higher data rates, lower latency, QoS-driven connectivity and future-proof deployments of direct communications. These technology enhancements are paving the way for ubiquitous and future-proof connectivity.

*Reiner Stuhlfauth is Technology Manager (Wireless) at Rohde & Schwarz GmbH and has more than 20 years’ experience in teaching and promoting mobile communication technologies. He is involved in several projects concerning 5G, 5G advanced and 6G research.

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