France Telecom, Peugeot and Ericsson to trial 5G in connected cars

5G connected-car trials on three kilometre section of French roads declared a success

France Telecom-owned Orange, Ericsson and PSA Group, owner of the Peugeot and Citroen car brands, have conducted connected-vehicle field trials using 5G technology.

The trials were conducted in France as part of the vendors' "Towards 5G" project, which took place along three kilometres of track in France.

The vehicles were connected to a "virtual core network" in Germany, which the companies called the "first cellular C-V2X field trial".

V2X stands for vehicle-to-X, in this case the rest of the network, and "C" stands for "cellular".

Using an "evolved LTE network infrastructure" (basically a big mast), a remote radio unit and the core network in Germany, the aim was to connect the car in a fast and sustained way while the vehicle was moving, in order to "see through" two connected vehicles, as well as track whether an emergency vehicle was approaching, causing a driver notification.

The test ran on the 2.6GHz frequency band, delivering 100Mbit/s bandwidth, and measuring latency of only 17-mlliseconds on average - effectively a real-time notification, the vendors argue.

The test was also able to stream high-definition footage of nearby vehicles through the network.

"These two use cases, currently developed and tested in the experimental network, have taken advantage of improved latency, and high throughput performance, using the network-based capabilities of C-V2X to deliver a high-resolution video stream between two vehicles, demonstrating reactivity to show real-time event notification," said Towards 5G.

"Advanced network features implemented in a new radio access network (RAN) configured with edge-computing features, allowed improved end-to-end transmission, with an average delay of 17 milliseconds for vehicle-to-network-to-vehicle (V2N2V) communications," confirmed the project runners.

"This is in comparison to the 30-60 millisecond results measured in today's LTE networks, and at a vehicle speed of 100 km/h. These results were obtained on the 2.6 GHz frequency band, delivering a 100 Mbit/s performance."

The tests will be further elaborated on at MWC next week, but V3 argues the future of 5G is still very much up in the air until both standards and infrastructure goals have been ironed out among the various concept tests.