Car2MEC, a project funded by the Bavarian Ministry for Economic Affairs, wrapped two years of intensive trialing and testing by Continental, Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer ESK, MHP and Nokia on the A9 motorway digital test track in Germany.
The project mission was to gain insights into the value of MEC for connected driving with regards to technology and network architecture as well as economically. The project partners tested a number of different use cases on the A9 motorway, including "emergency warning", "end of jam warning", "variable speed limit assistant" and "HD maps".
For the motorway test set-up, Deutsche Telekom deployed two locally separated MEC nodes based on Nokia's technology. The testbed shared resources with the LTE live network and had been operated for 12 months allowing for extensive test drives. Fraunhofer ESK's hybrid communication units enabled a highly-efficient distributed messaging service (GeoService) on the multi-access edge nodes. MHP provided insights into MEC's value for connected driving from a business perspective.
"The project results validate the performance of edge computing over our 4G networks as a potential enabler for automotive cases that require low latency and ultra-high reliability," says Alexander Lautz, Senior Vice President 5G, Deutsche Telekom. "Going forward, we will continue to collaborate with partners in the automotive sector on the evolution of the technology and its application in connected and automated driving solutions that will deliver the best driving experience."
Uwe Puetzschler, Car2MEC project lead and head of Car2X at Nokia : "The results from this project mark a big step forward on the way to safe and automated driving. We have demonstrated that the Edge Cloud on top of 4G and 5G networks allows to deploy distributed applications that meet the requirements of the automotive industry in terms of latency and reliability. This will accelerate a commercial deployment of the technology."
