Potential 5G Applications for Connected Vehicles: Use Cases, Opportunities and Challenges

The fifth generation of wireless networks (5G) is not just an evolutionary upgrade of the previous generations of cellular communications, but rather a revolutionary technology envisioned to meet the access, bandwidth, performance, and latency requirements associated with various vertical industries. In this context, this paper makes an analysis of the capability of 5G systems to support various advanced use cases of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) industry. First, the most representative ITS use cases and associated scenarios are selected and described together with their key challenges. To efficiently trial the considered use case scenarios, a three-step method is proposed, where the focus will be initially on performing local tests and eventually evolve towards interconnected multi-site setups. Finally, the technical opportunities and business challenges associated with the future application of 5G to intelligent road transport are discussed and some of the future directions are highlighted