Ericsson said its 5GCAR project has won the race to secure funding from the European Union. The project will be part of phase 2 of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP), which is working to make Europe the leader in areas that have the potential to create new markets like smart cities, e-health, and intelligent transport. According to Ericsson, the 5GCAR Project has six key goals:
- Develop an overall 5G system architecture providing optimized end-to-end V2X network connectivity for highly reliable and low-latency V2X services, which supports security and privacy, manages quality-of-service and provides traffic flow management in a multi-RAT and multi-link V2X communication system.
- Interworking of multi-RATs that allows embedding existing communication solutions and novel 5G V2X solutions.
- Develop an efficient, secure and scalable sidelink interface for low-latency, high-reliability V2X communications.
- Propose 5G radio-assisted positioning techniques for both vulnerable road users and vehicles to increase the availability of very accurate localization.
- Identify business models and spectrum usage alternatives that support a wide range of 5G V2X services.
- Demonstrate and validate the developed concepts and evaluate the quantitative benefits of 5G V2X solutions using automated driving scenarios in test sites.
The 5GCAR project includes a total of 14 consortium partners: Ericsson, Bosch, Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Centro Tecnológico de Automoción de Galicia, Chalmers University of Technology, Huawei, King’s College London, Marben, Nokia, Orange, PSA group, LTE chipmaker Sequans, Viscoda, and Volvo Cars. The inclusion of Huawei and Nokia is significant because it means that Europe’s three leading suppliers of wireless infrastructure equipment are all part of the same initiative for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2X) communication. Researchers believe that V2X communication will be key to enabling connected cars to actually improve traffic flow.
“The European funding granted to our 5GCAR project is a major step, as it will allow our initiative to further develop in order to meet the market needs by 2020,” said Franck Bouetard, head of Ericsson France. “Having such projects in Europe is key in this worldwide race, as it will secure additional business and employment in the continent in the future.”
