Vodafone's Test and Innovation Centre in Dusseldorf, Germany, has been the testing site for car-to-car telematics. The trial, in co-operation with Ford and Ericsson, used LTE to determine how the technology could support applications ranging from infotainment to time-critical driver assistance functions.
The tests involved measuring the propagation time between LTE modules fitted to the Ford vehicles. The result, when the leading car braked heavily, was an emergency display triggered in the following Ford car within less than 100 milliseconds.
"Intelligent vehicles, able to send and receive messages in fractions of a second, could help warn drivers of dangers neither they nor their hazard monitoring safety systems could spot, be it because of the distance to the hazard or obstacles that block the view ahead, such as heavy traffic or bends in the road," Christian Ress, a connectivity technical expert with Ford, said in a statement.
The Cooperative Cars Extended (CoCarX) research project, which has been running since 2009, was established to develop systems and infrastructure that would allow vehicles to update each other with hazard, driving condition and traffic information.
This latest effort to use LTE was reported by the trials' engineers to have demonstrated that it was now possible to use a single LTE connection to support several concurrent car telematics services. The tests also found that LTE was capable of complementing vehicle telematic designs based upon the 802.1p standard by being able to forward relevant messages to a greater number of road users.
Ford also claimed that car passengers could now download videos while the driver was being kept informed of real-time traffic messages using the LTE connection.
For more:
- see this release
- see this EE Times article
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