Could you explain why autonomous cars need 5g? I’ve heard that claim a lot and I don’t understand. These cars are driven by AI:s that can simulate human driving, and humans don’t need 5g to drive, hence AI:s should not need it either. Or will 5g enable some super-human driving?
The argument is partly marketing BS and partly true. Autonomous vehicles are possible with 4G, as Tesla is already demonstrating. However, autonomous cars will require a lot more cellular traffic, and 5G makes it possible to send more data over the same amount of spectrum space. Autonomous vehicles need to send/receive a lot of data to/from the servers and there are proposals that they be able to communicate with other cars on the road to coordinate their driving. 5G will make it possible to handle a lot more cellular traffic, so the system can handle milliones of autonomous vehicles on the road.
However, the mmWave spectrum is not reliable enough for autonomous vehicles, because its signal can be blocked by rain, snow and hail. Low band 5G doesn’t allow much information to be transmitted, so it isn’t any better than existing mid-band LTE in terms of data speeds (although it has much better range). It is only when you are looking at mid-band 5G (between 2 and 6 gigahertz) that 5G really makes sense for autonomous vehicles and in the US very little of that spectrum has been allocated for 5G so far.
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For some reason I have it in my head that 5G (and 6G) have better latency that is needed for more autonomous safety (less lag on decition making). Some of that is not due signal but of network properties where computing and connections are less centralized, more directly on the edge of the network - much in connection to that being connected to other vehicles and roadsigns etc.
Yes, 5G promises lower latency, but the gains aren’t as much as you might think. With standard LTE you get about 50ms latency. LTE with Short TTI (specified in 3GPP release 15) gets 30ms latency. 5G gets about 20ms latency in the real world, although theoretically it can reach 1ms latency.
This doesn’t make sense. What does 5G provide for autonomy in vehicles? It’s not GPS, which is about the only over the air technology that I know of that can be used for determining location. Even traffic data shouldn’t require 5G. It was being provided over radio (FM) is RDS in 2000.
@amosbatto Any idea what the need is? Not just now but for an actually reliable system?
@lwriemen Any autonomous system will poll it’s surrounding thousands of times - including any beacons, networked data, other vehicles etc. (in addition to sensors like cameras). Corrections and decisions about corrections are made that often. Position is not from a GPS only - way too inaccurate. Radio info for traffic is not what an autonomous vehicle could rely on to be safe. I would imagine the vehicle also uploading traffic data for a networked “smart” guidance. The question is, is 15-30ms fast enough (comparison, human has a lag of about 100-300ms to slam the brakes, but autonomous may have limits to what to do and need more time to execute, say, a safe braking).
C-V2X, which is the standard for allowing cars to communicate wirelessly with each other, works on both 4G and 5G. This is going to allow cars to coordinate in their driving. For example, if one car decides to brake, then it will inform the car behind it to also brake, which will avoid a lot of accidents.
With 5G you are getting better latency, faster download/upload speeds, and the ability to handle a lot more traffic in the same amount of spectrum space, so you can support the kind of network traffic that they expect to need in the future to operate >1 billion autonomous vehicles.
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Latency doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s touted as a killer feature because previous network generations actually didn’t have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_network_slicing
It’s basically Quality of Service on the network level.
It has some funny net neutrality implications I learned about at the CCC. In short, prioritizing some traffic over other traffic. A longer writeup is here: https://www.dqindia.com/net-neutrality-age-5g/
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I guess 10 years (almost 20 years since I’ve worked on navigation aspects) out of automotive is a long time for this. 
So C-V2X is to compensate for radar/lidar lapses in weather conditions, but how is the order of vehicles established? Response time? I’m assuming we’re talking direct vehicle to vehicle comm.
This also assumes autonomous vehicle to autonomous vehicle communication, which is not a very good solution.
treading in off topic folks . theres a 5g thread in the round table if im not mistaken
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