Adopt C-V2X for ‘smart vehicle’ connectivity urges NGMN Alliance
December 6, 2018
By Chris Forrester
The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) has written to the European Commission’s President Jean-Claude Junker (and its various Directorate Commissioners responsible) to speedily adopt the Cellular-V2X technology in place of 801.11p in order to reduce the ‘time to market’ and harmonisation for network operators and the motor industry in the build-up to 5G, and for implementation of ‘smart’ connectivity to cars and vehicles.
The NGMN advocates for an affordable mobile broadband service geared towards the end user, with a particular focus on 5G. The letter calls upon European legislators to reconsider the current EC Delegated Act by including C-V2X on the list of potential technologies that European stakeholders may pursue and allow the market to decide which technology prevails.
The NGMN board says it believes that C-V2X is not only able to enhance safety features for vehicles,
but also supports use cases for other traffic participants, like pedestrians and cyclists. NGMN has investigated and concluded that C-V2X technology is superior to the aging IEEE 802.11p standards, technically, economically, and eco-system wise, and can well satisfy the basic safety applications.
The Alliance says it is very concerned that currently the EC rules out the most recent technology, Cellular-V2X, favouring a specific and single-purpose Wi-Fi based technology path, ITS-G5, which has no relationship to 5G technology and no evolutionary path towards compatibility with future 5G based C-ITS systems generations, as being planned in 5GAA, 5GCAR and other groups, thus precluding the evolution to 5G for connected cars.
In February 2015 the NGMN Alliance published its 5G White Paper providing consolidated 5G operator requirements. In June 2016, NGMN created a V2X task force to study and evaluate V2X technologies and requirements and harmonise Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) views on LTE-based V2X and DSRC/IEEE-802.11p. The task force objectives were to reduce time to market of C-V2X technology, and trigger cooperation with the automotive industry. The results of the work were published in a White Paper in June 2018, which presents a summary of the findings of the NGMN V2X task force.
The Alliance, which already has members supplying some sort of connectivity to about 30 million vehicles worldwide, says that “It is expected that in the near future every vehicle will be equipped with cellular connectivity. This is a good and market driven basis for the deployment of further C-V2X technology and services.”