Newsletter
Qualcomm has now announced a joint demonstration of the ongoing Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) itself and other companies have been working on, scheduled to take place at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS-A) World Meeting. That event takes place in Detroit from June 4 through June 7, just months after the chipset manufacturer announced the start of trials centered around the technology. C-V2X, for those who may not be aware, is fairly self-explanatory. It’s a hardware and software platform intended to allow a huge variety of vehicle types to automatically detect other connection-enabled devices in the immediate vicinity. The obvious implication is that the technology itself could save lives since they would have an extra “sensory” input to recognize pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles that are connected. Moreover, it’s intended to aid self-driving vehicles in optimizing fuel efficiency and more generally with the task of vehicle operation. This newly announced test, meanwhile, aims to show that the platform is viable not only in a select handful of models but that it’s cross-compatible across a variety of makes and models.
Participants in the demonstration will include the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA), Audi AG, Ford Motor Company, and Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. This will be both the world’s first live showcase of the tech and a showcase of the only 5G-ready, 3GPP specifications approved C-V2X platform. Ford and Audi vehicles retrofitted with Qualcomm’s own C-V2X chipset will be shown maneuvering through a series of scenarios. The 5GAA will be present as a partner but also as a representative of its more than 80 members involved in similar endeavors. Scenarios will cover vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, where the vehicles will alert each other to left-hand turns and emergency breaking without a clear line of sight available. However, it will also showcase similar scenarios for situations involving both vulnerable road users (VRU), which includes cyclists or motorcycle riders, and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communications. Those scenarios would involve recognition of those individuals either via a C-V2X chip – for the motorcycle – or other connected technologies like a smartphone. In either case, the connection would allow the vehicle to determine the appropriate action to take to avoid an accident, even with low or no visibility.
The final demo will involve vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications intended to optimize traffic flow and related issues. As to the technology itself, Qualcomm says it operates in real-time via the 5.9 GHz ITS spectrum and nearly doubles the range of traditional 802.11p radios. A portion of the demonstration will undoubtedly discuss those features, as well as security. The latter includes industry designed standards for security transport layers and application protocols.