PROJECT TITLE

5G for Connected and Automated Road Mobility in the European UnioN

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

The objective of 5G-CARMEN is to leverage on the most recent 5G advances to provide Mobile (Virtual) Network Operators, Over-the-Top providers, and service providers with a multi-tenant platform that can support the automotive sector transformation towards delivering safer, greener, and more intelligent transportation with the ultimate goal of enabling self-driving cars, while harnessing the concept of “Mobility Corridors”. In 5G-CARMEN important European industries, academics and innovative SMEs commit to achieve world-wide impact by conducting extensive trials across an important corridor (by people/goods traffic volumes), from Bologna to Munich, spanning 600 km of roads, connecting three European regions (Bavaria, Tirol and Trentino/South-Tyrol) across three countries.

5G-CARMEN investigates four application scenarios: cooperative maneuvering, situation awareness, green driving, and infotainment. The project targets automation level up to SAE L3 and L4. Its use cases are expected to have a societal impact by improving both traffic safety, enabling coordinated driving by enhancing environment perception, as well as reducing emissions by aggregating heterogeneous information. Moreover, a commercial impact is expected laying automotive OEMs, the telecom operators and the roadways operators on the global forefront of Safety and Driving Assistance Systems. Moreover, the 5G-CARMEN system is expected to have an impact on the over-the-top service providers, providing advanced infotainment services to passengers in cars and/ or coaches. The project builds a 5G-enabled corridor to conduct cross-border trials and deploys a mixture of 5G micro- and macro-cells for ubiquitous C-V2X connectivity. The 5G New Radio is used to support latency sensitive and/or bandwidth hungry services and applications. The project leverages on a distributed mobile edge cloud spanning from the vehicle itself to the centralised cloud. Multi-tenancy and neutral host concepts are leveraged upon to deliver a final platform capable of enabling new business models. 5G-CARMEN complements C-V2X with LTE and C-ITS technologies, targeting interoperability and harnessing a hybrid network.

The key innovations proposed by 5G-CARMEN project are centered around a hybrid network, combining direct short range V2V and V2I communications, long-range V2N network communications and back-end solutions into a single platform capable of delivering telecom services over a combination of cellular and meshed networks, which can be operated by different M(V)NOs. The platform employs different enabling technologies such as 5G New Radio, C-V2X, and secure, multi-domain, and crossborder orchestration to provide end-to-end network services.

8BELLS ROLE

8BELLS contributes with its expertise to the description of the planned use case scenarios, to the high-level architecture specification as well as to system level technical specifications. Furthermore, 8BELLS is involved in defining and addressing cybersecurity threats and proposing incentive models for sharing sensor’s data under GDPR-based privacy management of personal data and also contributes on privacy preserving federation. Moreover, 8BELLS carries out a market analysis of the 5G C-V2X roll out activities, their potential market share, strengths and weaknesses, as well as the main characteristics of the new markets unleashed by Connected Vehicle and Inter-Vehicle communication with respect to the eMBB, mMTC and uRLLC class services. Finally, 8BELLS investigates the exploitation perspectives and the social impact of the proposed solution as well as of Machine-to-Machine Centric 5G networks in general.