5G for tomorrow’s mobility

Testing 5G functionalities for connected driving in a real traffic environment 

The new 5G mobile communications standard is putting connected driving within reach. Faster data connections, minimum latency and high reliability pave the way toward optimized traffic concepts that enable vehicles to communicate with their environment and be intelligently integrated into the traffic flow.

Companies can find out whether this also works smoothly in practice at our 5G Bavaria automotive test bed. Since May, companies have been able to give their 5G applications a “reality check” in the test bed sponsored by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy. In this way, applications can be put through their paces under various reception conditions before being launched on the market. The controlled and reproducible test environment south of Rosenheim is ideal for this purpose due to its heterogeneous road area.

The automotive test bed is of particular use to developers who want to test new connectivity solutions in a real road network. The focus is on testing transmission technology and evaluating specific transmitter and receiver components. Essential performance parameters such as latency, reliability and throughput provide valuable insights into a given application’s quality of service and user experience. Connected driving introduces new functions that can be evaluated on the area’s test routes just as comprehensively as the quality of the data connections between the vehicle and the wireless network and among the vehicles themselves.

Connected car scenarios can also be expanded to include infrastructure components such as stationary traffic monitoring systems with object recognition. A local multi-access edge computing server can help test numerous applications in cases that require short response times, need to avoid cloud processing due to privacy concerns, or where local processing is preferred to reduce network traffic.