Overview
European mobility is drastically changing: growing urbanisation, environmental aspects, and safety are only a few of the key indicators pointing in this direction. Road infrastructures and vehicles are blending with the digital world, becoming always-connected, automated and intelligent, delivering optimal experience to passengers, and addressing societal goals (e.g., emission and accident reduction) and economic needs (e.g., vehicles as smart-living environments). In this respect, the European Union pushes for large-scale collaborative cross-border validation activities on cooperative, connected and automated mobility.
5G-CARMEN addresses these challenges harnessing the concept of “Mobility Corridors”. In 5G-CARMEN important European industries, academics and innovative SMEs commit to achieve world-wide impact by conducting extensive trials across an important corridor (by people/goods traffic volumes), from Bologna to Munich, spanning 600 km of roads, connecting three European regions (Bavaria, Tirol and Trentino/South-Tyrol) across three countries. Vehicle manoeuvre negotiation (at various levels of automation), infotainment, and emission control in sensitive areas are the cross-border use cases targeted by 5G-CARMEN pilots in order to maximise the project commercial, societal, end environmental impact.
The project will build a 5G-enabled corridor to conduct cross-border trials and will deploy a mixture of 5G micro- and macro-cells for ubiquitous C-V2X connectivity. The 5G New Radio will be used to support latency sensitive and/or bandwidth hungry services and applications. The project will leverage on a distributed mobile edge cloud spanning from the vehicle itself to the centralised cloud. Multi-tenancy and neutral host concepts will be leveraged upon to deliver a final platform capable of enabling new business models. 5G-CARMEN will complement C-V2X with LTE and C-ITS technologies, targeting interoperability and harnessing a hybrid network.