Nokia's HERE navigation business said it is ready to press ahead with a pilot of a traffic information system based on existing LTE infrastructure, following the successful completion of a small-scale trial of the service.
The company said a test of the cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) in the Greater Helsinki area proved the effectiveness of 4G cellular connections for distributing notifications on traffic conditions and potential road hazards, and paved the way for a full pilot of the system.
VTT, the Technical Research Centre of Finland, conducted the trial as part of a broader pilot project named NordicWay, a collaboration of public and private partners that is partly financed by the European Union with the goal of trialling C-ITS on a corridor of roads running through Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
In a statement, HERE said the VTT trial in Helsinki showed that its system "performed well in distributing targeted notifications about road hazards and conditions to relevant vehicles at low latencies."
The company noted that using standard and commercial 4G infrastructure removed the need for the deployment of additional roadside infrastructure such as dedicated short range communications (DSRC) equipment.
HERE said it is now preparing for a full pilot of the cellular C-ITS system, which will begin in the spring of 2016 and cover three major highways in southern Finland. The pilot scheme will marry the cellular coverage with HERE location cloud and data analytics to "connect vehicles and traffic management centres in an intelligent system," HERE explained.
The ultimate goal of the NordicWay project is to deliver a common architecture that will pave the way for deployment of automated cloud communication of problems on the road ahead, such as dangerous surface conditions, accidents and congestion.
Pilot projects will involve up to 2,000 volunteer drivers, with data from their vehicles' onboard sensors and surrounding infrastructure utilised to build that picture of traffic and road conditions via a shared C-ITS network.
For more:
- see this HERE announcement
- view details of the NordicWay project
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