As the industry pulls together specifications for 5G networks, Huawei director Ryan Ding says controlling autonomous vehicles will be a key task, according to Global Telecoms Business.
In vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems, cars will need to communicate with each other and with objects, and that requires very low latency and fast speeds.
A car going 60 mph travels nearly 28 meters every second. That is about just over an inch every millisecond, and if 5G systems are going to let cars drive autonomously and avoid collisions with other cars as well as pedestrians, every inch is important, GTB points out.
With 4.5G, latency will be only 10 milliseconds, which will start to make it suitable for applications such as connected vehicles. It also will be able to connect more than 30 billion things as part of the Internet of Things. With 5G, the industry is talking about one millisecond latency, according to Ding, with data rates up to 10 gigabits per second and 100 billion things connected.
Current latency of mobile networks is around 140 milliseconds, which is enough for people but not for vehicle communications.
Huawei is working with a large car manufacturer on machine-to-machine technology, though Ding did not identify which one. "This is still an ongoing project," he told the publication. "We are still discussing whether we should announce it."
Huawei has focused a great deal of its attention on 5G, saying it is aiming for trials in 2018, with the first commercial applications coming in 2020.
Last week, the ITU announced a new focus group to identify the network standardization requirements for the 5G development of International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) for 2020 and beyond. Network studies will be hosted by ITU's Standardization Sector (ITU-T), benefiting from the strength of ITU-T standardization in wireline.
"5G will power a wide range of new user experiences, but the bottleneck remains the speed of the network," said Wen Tong, head of 5G Research and Development at Huawei, in a release. "Everyone in the ICT ecosystem needs to work together. This is the most important condition for us to realize 5G, and this is the reason Huawei is contributing to ITU's efforts to consider what the road to 5G demands of all parts of the ecosystem."
For more:
- see this Global Telecoms Business article (sub. req.)
- see this Inside 5G article
- see this ITU release
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