Live Trial of 5G Connected Car Concept To Launch in Turin, Italy

Turin (ITALY) – On 2 December, the City of Turin (Italy) will host a live trial of new driver and pedestrian safety technology allowing near-real-time notification of roadway hazards through 5G-Edge networks. This trial is one of a series conducted internationally by a historic public-private collaboration over the next few years, organized by the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) and eight member companies representing leading technology companies from around the globe.

“This collaboration between the 5G Automotive Association and its member companies is the perfect example of how we can secure safety on roads and build the future of connected mobility,” said Maxime Flament, CTO of 5GAA. “This time, demonstrated use-cases take place in Europe through 5G and Edge networks—I look forward to seeing more in the future in the United States and other continents.”

The promise of 5G and Edge technology has long been anticipated to deliver new connected services that will revolutionize daily life, with the estimated new economic opportunity stretching into the trillions USD over the next 10-years1. The global connected car market size alone is projected to reach USD 191.83 billion by 2028.

5G transmission speeds and so-called “Edge” servers—locally installed, high-powered computers capable of running Artificial Intelligence programs—open the door to smart city technologies like near real-time traffic management and innumerable other business applications. The connected car concept uses this high-speed and Edge computing technology to communicate with car sensors and pedestrian smartphones, via a user-authorized mobile app—about traffic hazards, like accidents and road construction—to Pedestrian and in-vehicle driver safety and efficient navigation.

“The connected car concept is an important validation of the combined value of Edge, of 5G and IOT,” said Paolo Campoli, Head of Global Service Provider sector at Cisco, “We are so excited to take part in this event that creates a platform for innovation in 5G IOT. The integration of 5G mobility, applications and data processing at the Edge requires expertise from very different domains—expertise that Cisco and Partners can bring. It includes elements of automation, intelligent infrastructure and workloads control, cybersecurity protection and end-to-end application observability. The live trial in Turin is a great opportunity to show how the intersection of Edge, 5G and IOT based on Standards creates a platform to connect Service Providers and Industries.”

This live international trial attempts to solve one of the more technical challenges of making the connected car concept a daily reality. The 5G networks underpinning the concept are managed by communication service providers (CoSPs) according to geography, each with different edge solutions that must be able to communicate without interruption of the V2X applications as drivers cross borders. Roaming services—the ability to make a call regardless of the network—is one early success of multi-mobile network operators (MNO). Demonstrating the connected car concept can work in a roaming scenario is the core objective of the live trial and represents the first of any such attempt in Europe.

“Telecom operators will have to play a major role by enabling applications and services for the connected car ecosystem,” says Shamik Mishra, CTO Connectivity, Capgemini Engineering. He further adds: “Capgemini is excited to bring its innovative federated MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing) platform and applications to this 5GAA trial to demonstrate the true value of intelligent industry, leveraging data in the vehicles and edge-cloud. The trials serve as a stepping-stone for realizing the potential for automakers to provide services to their connected cars from the network”. The trial will demonstrate how the car manufacturers, MNOs and technology providers come together to help overcome the challenge of when a vehicle moves from one network boundary to another or Inter-MNO handover of MEC service.

The Turin live trial addresses three objectives:

  • Objective 1: Multi-MNO scenario: How can a vehicle, which has radio access to MNO A, use a MEC application, which is operated by MNO B -> Interworking between MNO‘s (by NOT losing the benefits of low latency)
  • Objective 2: Global operational Availability: How can an OEM as the MEC application developer be sure, especially on a global basis, that a MEC application works in the same way if it’s operated by MNO A, or if it’s operated by MNO B
  • Objective 3: Multi-MNO with roaming scenario: Where the two operators can seamlessly transfer the V2X service from one operator to the other as the car OEM moves from one geo to the other in a roaming scenario. Typically, when an in-vehicle driver does a cross-border travel that involves two operators.

One of the key benefits of the trial is the value demonstrated by bringing in a large ecosystem to help develop not only the technology but also build the business case and model that will help drive the market adoption for 5G and C-V2X to help into the digital transformation of smart cities of the future. To succeed in this endeavor, it will need a village and investment from both public and private sectors to help adopt this new technology to provide a quality of life for all citizens.

The city of Turin is delighted to facilitate the 5GAA Multi Operator MEC Trial with its Smart Road infrastructure and the technical support of 5T. We see – Chiara Foglietta, Deputy Mayor for Mobility, Ecological and Digital transition, Innovation says – C-V2X services as fundamental to develop a sustainable and safe mobility for all the citizens, whatever transport means they use. In the future, Turin wants to continue the collaboration with 5GAA and offer its Smart Road infrastructure for further scale in the live traffic within Torino City Lab and the new project “ Turin House of emerging Technologies – CTE NEXT”

“As TIM, we are honored to be hosting in Turin such a challenging trial by leveraging our Innovation Lab competencies and our pre-commercial instances of Edge Cloud,” says Daniele Franceschini TIM VP Innovation, Standard and Portfolio. “The federation model implemented with our partners enables a ‘continuum’ between Edge Cloud instances allowing players from the automotive industry and beyond to benefit from a seamless cloud experience across country boundaries.”

“Greater connectivity speeds, improved hardware and expanded software expertise have opened new opportunities for Stellantis with safety systems being one of the many areas we focus on,” said Mamatha Chamarthi, Head of Software Business and Product Management. “Through smart and strategic partnerships such as 5GAA, we will capitalize on next-generation systems and prove out the technology.”

The demonstration brings new learnings for various players across the value chain and creates a testbed for trying out new 5G connected car services at the Edge in subsequent phases. The Turin Live Trial will run throughout the day on 2 December 2021.

BACKGROUND

In this live trial, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefonica, BT/EE will demonstrate the NSA 5G networking capabilities and the Edge Cloud solution to deliver connected car use cases at the Edge of their networks for their customers. TIM makes its Innovation Lab facilities available and its commercial 5G network with pre-commercial Edge Cloud specific features such as Local Break Out, that together with the federation of edge platforms in TIM, BT/EE and Telefonica make the use cases available for roaming users from BT/EE and Telefonica.

The three companies are hosting Capgemini’s ENSCONCE MEC platform, built upon the Intel Smart Edge Open toolkit, the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit, and Intel hardware to enable connected car use cases at the Edge on 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor equipped Cisco Servers. Intel Smart Edge Open (formerly known as OpenNESS) is a royalty-free edge computing software toolkit for building optimized and performant edge platforms.

“The international live trial of building and provisioning Connected Car edge services in a multi-operator scenario is a transformative 5G and Edge use case,” said Renu Navale, Vice President and General Manager of Smart Edge Platforms Division at Intel. “This trial demonstrates the possibilities that 5G connectivity and edge computing can bring to connected car solutions, when the broad ecosystem collaborates and uses Intel technologies such as Xeon processors, Smart Edge Open and OpenVINO.”

Capgemini’s ENSCONCE MEC Platform provides multi-tenancy and multi-MNO MEC federation capabilities. The visual compute applications for pedestrian detection and tracking supported by Capgemini’s Orbital Car Situational Awareness V2X platform. To realize the Active and Passive Vulnerable Road User (VRU) use cases, Cisco provides the Edge infrastructure based on CISCO UCS Servers (the Unified Computing Systems that combines computing, network and management in a cohesive architecture) hosting the ESCONCE platform, used to demonstrate Virtual-RSU and host V2X applications that are based on the Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel HDDL-R Visual Accelerators. Harman International and Capgemini provide the Virtual-RSU and RSE solutions respectively to realize various V2X use cases with location-aware and AI inferencing technologies. Harman also offers V2X Application Server and a 5G enabled TCU that integrates seamlessly with Stellantis/FCA car and hosts V2X applications.

“It is key that operators and industry partners collaborate to explore the technical feasibility and benefits to unlock the new business opportunities and services to our customers. In this project, we are jointly evaluating the potential to federate edge cloud compute capabilities across multiple geographies to support low latency use cases, including key connected car use cases being delivered as 5G edge services in a multi-MNO, multi-OEM environment,” said Sunil Joshi, Senior Manager, Global Roaming Products at BT/EE.

“Telecom operators will have a key role in supporting V2X services and this trial demonstrates the value of leveraging mobile architecture, federating edge platforms and allowing local break out in visited network. Such an approach as defined in the GSMA Operator Platform Group allows customers and developers to deploy their applications across multiple operator domains, and our end users to have the best latency and customer experience when accessing their services,” said Juan Carlos Garcia,  Senior Vice-President of technology innovation and ecosystems, Telefonica.

“At Harman, we are focused on building connectivity solutions at the intersection of 5G, V2X and Edge Computing that will build more equity on the road for all users,” said Mahsa Nakhjiri, Director, Product Management. “While these technologies can unlock many new use cases and experiences, the most important element of any solution in this space is safety.  As programs such as this one fueled by the collaboration of industry leaders and organizations like 5GAA bring a new degree of safety to users, they will also lead to a higher level of confidence in autonomous vehicles.”

This content extract was originally sourced from an external website (5GAA) and is the copyright of the external website owner. TelecomTV is not responsible for the content of external websites. Legal Notices

Email Newsletters

Sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos, plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox.