Automotive: Technical Viewpoints

The 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) was created to connect the telecom industry and vehicle manufacturers to develop end-to-end solutions for future mobility and transportation services. The 5GAA runs 5 working groups: use cases and technical requirements (WG1), system architecture and solution development (WG2), evaluation, testbeds and pilots (WG3), standards and spectrum (WG4), business models and go-to-market strategies (WG5).

5GAA is a 3GPP MRP. 

Summary of technical viewpoints for 5G standardisation from Dr Maxime Flament, 5GAA CTO: C-V2X and intelligent transport systems (July 2019) 

5GAA timeline for the deployment of C-V2X (V2X/V2I)

• From a go-to-market perspective, we are looking at 3 years for device rollout and integration into vehicles. China plans its first rollout in mid-2020; Ford plans rollout in 2022.
• Regulations need to lower market entry barriers. 

5G for Automotive: market and standards landscape

• Current work builds on early contributions to 5G standardisation for 3GPP Rel-15.
• C-V2X (Rel-14): chipsets from various vendors.
• mid-2017: chipsets for testing. 
• 2018: interoperability C-V2X tests. 
• And for 3GPP Rel-16: 2018-2019: commercial availability of Mode-4 chips.
• Second half of 2018: C-V2X is real and ready with commercial chipsets.
• 2020: start of vehicle deployment. In-vehicle commercial deployment (i.e. type approved) expected at the latest in 2020 globally.

3GPP Time Plan: from LTE-V2X to 5G-V2X

• Current version is C-V2X called LTE-V2X as part of 3GPP Rel-14. 
• NR-V2X as part of Rel-16 for improving automated driving. Rel-16 is planned for 03/2020
• NR-V2X will complement, co-exist and support interworking with LTE-V2X. The 3GPP Work item on NR-V2X started in March 2019. 

Spectrum

• 5.9 GHz spectrum target availability in H2-2017: test spectrum availability in China and spectrum available in Europe. 

Work in 3GPP on NR-V2X & Autonomous Driving

• SA1 TS 22.186 & 5GAA White Paper

Use cases for autonomous driving applications 

1. Vehicle platooning.

2. Cooperative operation, sensor sharing.

3. Remote driving.

4. Advanced driving.

5GAA Rel-17 requirements

• Important that 3GPP has C-V2X continuous work in Rel-17 and beyond.

• UE enhancements, e.g. power-saving enhancement for UE of vulnerable road users, discontinuous transmission (DTX). 

• Sidelink evolution, e.g. positioning level of accuracy, capacity enhancements, improve reliability, baseline for operation with 2TX/2RX antennas, mmWave bands (FR2). 

• Architecture gap closure and enhancement, e.g. Uu multicast, group cast enhancement, network based positioning accuracy enhancement.

• Minimisation of drive tests (MDT) and self-organizing networks (SON) automotive enhancement, e.g. sidelink QoS measurement report. 

• Prediction of the QoS parameters of the communication link (PL5 mode 1 & 2 and Uu), for example, by considering geographic information of the UE (route information), a.o.

• It is important that 3GPP ensures robustness of the system, e.g. high congestion, message sizes and trigger conditions (as defined in TS 22.185 and TS 22.186), effective and flexible Doppler compensation at high speed, recipient mixture (unicast, multicast, broadcast).

• 3GPP should keep Rel-16 assumption on co-existence with other ITS technologies in the same frequency band.

• Proven support of KPIs in TS 22.186.

5GAA white papers for further reading 

January 2020: Making 5G Proactive and Predictive for the Automotive Industry

July 2019: C-V2X Use Cases: Methodology, Examples and Service Level Requirements

January 2019: Benefits of using existing Cellular Networks for the Delivery of C-ITS